Register as a source of non-equivalent contracted constructions: going to and gonna in British English

Abstract Recent studies in Construction Grammar have suggested that contracted modals constitute different constructions from their full forms. In this article, we present a corpus-based analysis of the relationship between the modal forms going to and gonna in British English used on the blogging platform LiveJournal. We report a Collostructional Analysis and a Behavioural Profile Analysis based on a logistic regression model of blind annotations, assessing factors of semantic, pragmatic and social meaning on the choice of the variant, in addition to processing factors. The results show that register formality is the only significant meaning predictor for the alternation between going to or gonna in the corpus. We discuss these results in light of recent theoretical debates on isomorphism and synonymy avoidance in Construction Grammar: specifically, our study provides evidence that social meaning drives the distinction between going to and gonna , validating the recently formulated Principle of No Equivalence, and providing further evidence for the constructionhood of contracted modals.