![]() | 1 | initial version |
I guess yesterday’s syntactical of “all be it” and “on to” changed “albeit” and “onto” of today’s morpheme .
That's right. The insight behind the quote is that, over time, what used to be a normal construction created through productive syntactic rules eventually can become 'crystallized' into a single word or morpheme.
A good example is gonna. I quote the following from its Wikipedia page:
The going-to future originated by the extension of the spatial sense of the verb go to a temporal sense (a common change – the same phenomenon can be seen in the preposition before). The original construction involved physical movement with an intention, such as "I am going [outside] to harvest the crop." The location later became unnecessary, and the expression was reinterpreted to represent a near future.
This shows how gonna was originally a normal syntactic construction (be + VERB-ing + to). In contrast, in modern colloquial English, gonna can be thought of as a single word (at least under certain criteria).
![]() | 2 | No.2 Revision |
I guess yesterday’s syntactical of “all be it” and “on to” changed “albeit” and “onto” of today’s morpheme .
That's right. The insight behind the quote is that, over time, what used to be a normal construction created through productive syntactic rules eventually can become 'crystallized' into a single word or morpheme.
A good example is gonna. I quote the following from its Wikipedia page:
The going-to future originated by the extension of the spatial sense of the verb go to a temporal sense (a common change – the same phenomenon can be seen in the preposition before). The original construction involved physical movement with an intention, such as "I am going [outside] to harvest the crop." The location later became unnecessary, and the expression was reinterpreted to represent a near future.
This shows how gonna was originally a normal syntactic construction (be + VERB-ing + to). In contrast, in modern colloquial English, gonna can be thought of patterns (in certain ways) as if it were a single word (at least under certain criteria).