Gonna

Ruth Walker (who runs Verbal Energy, the Christian Science Monitor's language blog, and with whom I've had a short e-mail exchange on the transition of "shop" from an intransitive to a transitive verb) mellows on elisions such as "gonna", noting that there is a clear semantic difference between "gonna" in the sense of "about to perform an action" and "going to" in the sense of "about to reach a location" - no one ever uses" gonna" in the latter context. Will Smith, for instance, sang about "going to Miami", not "gonna Miami".

And my apologies for referencing a terrible Will Smith song.

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