Comments on: He Wanna Be Adored

By: s. e.

s. e. — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:02:53 +0000

One more comment. Wanna is a contraction of ‘want to’, and replaces it in common usage without changing the meaning. It performs an identical function. It’s simply easier to speak the transition from vowel sound to vowel sound ‘a’ to ‘o’ without the ‘t.’ From there the transformation of the second vowel ‘o’ to the a repeat of the first producing a-n-a is perfectly logical. Less energy expended, same result. The use of ‘wanna’ for ‘wants to’ not only simplifies the process of speaking, but simplifies the language itself. The word now performs two functions, as ‘want to’ OR ‘wants to,’ and the result is a ‘contraction’ not just of sound but of meaning, and that denotes a vulgarization.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 05:59:20 +0000

Generally speaking Wanna = want Wanna≠wants But there’s no law, and no accounting for taste. In any event it’s not a question of right or wrong but of unnecessary ‘uneconomical’ complexity. But poetry or lyrics are not meant to be economical. Why not add the extra baggage? It adds a layer of ironic distance. T.S. Eliot would approve.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 05:58:05 +0000

Wanna = want Wanna≠wants But there’s no law, and no accounting for taste. In any event it’s not a question of right or wrong but of unnecessary ‘uneconomical’ complexity. But poetry or lyrics are not meant to be economical. So why not add the extra baggage? It adds a layer of ironic distance. T.S. Eliot would approve.

By: triticale

triticale — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 02:21:08 +0000

Does Mary wanna smoke some marywanna?

By: msg

msg — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 19:38:38 +0000

Kip gits it. Only “wantsta”. People have not been given permission to write “wantsta”. “wanna” they have. It’s a narcissism thing with “wanna”. The infantilization of the polis. “Wantsta” is third-person, which means a recognition of the other. “Wanna” is threshold speech. Comes right after “yes” and “no” in the language armamentarium.

By: JRoth

JRoth — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 16:52:44 +0000

I can’t attach it directly to anything anyone else has said, but surely it’s significant that, in January of 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wanted to hold the hand of English girls, but wanna’d hold the hand of American girls. If that was too awkward, I’m simply saying that the English release of that song was titled “I want to hold…” and the American release was “I wanna hold…”

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 16:19:53 +0000

Kieran is wrong—I’m 32 and I’ll take “I wanna be sedated” any day. (Er, unless he doesn’t count 2001 as recent…) I think “wannabe” is a noun or adjective, while “wanna be” is a verb. (If you think I’m kidding, you’re mostly right.)

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:19:41 +0000

…leaves “to” a dependent surface form of “want.” should read: …leaves “to” a surface form dependent on “want”. I think I had better get back to work now.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:18:17 +0000

I should add that this can also account for the following sentences, but only if I push my case: 1 – He wants to be adored. 2 – *He wanna be adored. 3 – Does he wanna be adored? The only way I can make sense of this is to assume that the infinitive form “to wanna” is also a part of the vernacular morphology of “to wanna + 2 args”. However, I must then have a special rule to account for this “to” that appears out of nowhere in sentence [1]. Since that would breach Occam’s Razor, I think the case I made above about the morphology of “to want to” is pure bollocks. It’s simpler to consider “wanna” a liason type phenomenon that occurs under any conditions where the argument structure places the surface forms “want” and “to” next to each other and leaves “to” a dependent surface form of “want.” However, the notion that there are two lexemes here, that are distinguished by their argument structures, remains sound. As, I believe, does my answer to the original problem.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:08:18 +0000

Brian, are you sure you’re not a closet lexicalist? (Or have you come out? I don’t know you that well.) We’ll get rid of the reflexiveness in the question for a moment, to make things less ambiguous. Consider the argument structure in the following two sentences: 1 – John wants Peter to die. 2 – John wants to die. Someone like Wierzbicka or Mel’cuk would define the verb in two different ways in these two cases: 1 – X wants Y to Z = X(cognitive agent) wants that subclause[Y(object) Z(action)] 2 – X wants to Z = X wants Y to Z = X(cognitive agent) wants that subclause[X Z(action)] This confusion is therefore entirely lexical, and goes away if you consider words to only have meanings in conjunction with the structure of their arguments. Our intuition that the problem is lexical is verified by translating these sentences into French: 3 – Jean veut que Pierre meure. 4 – Jean veut mourir. Here, the subclausal nature of the underlying semantic construction in [1] is made into a surface syntactic feature, while in English it is absorbed into the structure “want + 3 arguments”. So, what you are really seeing here is where two lexemes that are distinguished by their argument structure alone in Standard English are, in Vernacular English, increasingly distinguishable morphologically. 5 – John wants Peter to die. 6 – John wants to die. 7 – You want Peter to die. 8 – You wanna die. *9- You wanna Peter to die. This intuition can, once again be verified by French translation: 8 – You wanna die 10 – Tu veux mourir. 7 – You want Peter to die. 11 – Tu veux que Pierre meure. *12- Tu veux Pierre mourir. The surface word “wanna” is simply the first and second person singular and the universal plural form of “to want to” + 2 arguments. This is evidence that the two argument structures designate different verbs despite homophonous surface forms in Standard English. Of course, this only makes sense in light of my judgement that your sentence 7b is fine, and otherwise I agree with your judgements. Under this analysis “Brian wants to win” is inherently reflexive. It is by semantic necessity self-directed. I am inclined to prefer answer 1: ? Brian wants Brian to win the election. I prefer this because the markedness of the sentence reflects the oddity of the situation. Brian does not want himself to win, he wants a person he doesn’t recognise, but who happens to be himself, to win. The semantic distance strongly implied by the “to want to + 3 args” lexeme fits this bill better, while the semantic identity required by the “to want to + 2 args” lexeme does not.

By: derPlau

derPlau — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 14:40:18 +0000

About half of the “he wanna”/’she wanna” searches on Google seem to be song lyrics—many of them repeats of the same song. Doing a google search on “he wanna” but excluding pages with the words “lyric” or “lyrics” drops the result count from “about 12,000” to “about 6,000”. A glance at the first few pages of the full search shows that most of the song lyrics are repeats of songs by Michael Jackson (“Superfly Sister”), 2Pac (“Shorty Wanna Be a Thug”), Aaliyah (“Extra Smooth”), and Bukka White (“Sleepy Man Blues”). Excluding those songs (using the search “he wanna” -superfly -shorty -”sleepy man” -”extra smooth”) drops the total to “about 9,290”. More or less the same thing happens with “she wanna”. This addresses my bizare obsessions far more than it does the subject of the original post, but it’s clear that the results from Google aren’t 12,000 independent uses of the phrase “he wanna”.

By: Sporty

Sporty — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 14:20:16 +0000

Raj is right… “If you wannabe my lover?” after all….

By: Mario

Mario — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 14:19:36 +0000

The odd thing about “wanna” is that it seems to work out better with nouns than pronouns. Compare “Polly wanna cracker” versus “He wanna cracker”. Of course, the first is a hard working clicle, but at least it works. The second doesn’t work at all. I think the “Polly” example works not only because it is a cliche, but because it is the question, “Does Polly want a cracker?” not the statement “Polly wants a cracker.” As a statement, it has the same problem that the other third person statements have.

By: John O'Neil

John O'Neil — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 14:15:05 +0000

Since I’m on the record on this issue, having written a PhD dissertation on the syntax of control clauses (“Means of Control”, Harvard U.), I think I probably should express an opinion on at least the semantics questions above. (As for the whole “wanna”-contraction debate, I’ve never been able to care enough about it to come up with a significantly better explanation than anyone else.) Anyway, let’s assume that the difference between the control and non-control clauses is that, in the control clause “Brian wants to win the election”, the subject “Brian” is a direct argument of both the verb “wants” and the verb “win”; in other words, in some sense that’s dictated by one’s preferred syntactic theory, the argument positions are composed and then assigned to the same argument. However, in the non-control sentence “Brian wants Brian/himself to win the election”, we have the two argument positions being assigned to different arguments, admittedly with the same reference, at least to the first approximation. However, if the embedded clause can refer to a different possible world (or a different discourse context, possibly), then it’s possible to imagine that you’re talking about different Brians in the non-control sentences—that is, the analogous Brians in different possible worlds. If this is an appropriate way to reflect the difference in knowledge between Brian and, well, Brian, then it also explains why the control clause doesn’t work in this case—because there aren’t two different “Brian” arguments to be in different possible worlds. However, since I’m not a formal semanticist by any means, perhaps I’ll take this opportunity to stop digging the hole deeper.

By: wolfangel

wolfangel — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 13:57:06 +0000

I wonder how many of the s/he wanna forms weren't from s/he wants to but something like What does s/he want to do? Or anything where the form is just plain want. 7b sounds as good as 3b and 4b to me, but 5b and 6b sound awful.