The PDE Data
In order to study a large number of naturally occurring instances of be fixing to and some of its reduced variants, I chose to collect tokens from internet writing. I decided to investigate internet writing for two reasons. First, given that be fixing to still occurs only rarely in traditional print, study of its usage in that medium was not practical at all. Secondly, as I indicated earlier, be fixing to shows a lot of social stratification and the opportunity for any one researcher to observe its use among various groups in any kind of natural setting is extremely limited, while internet usage is open to all observers. Thomas Sabo Charms In fact as it turns out, the study of be fixing to in internet writings reveals certain interesting aspects concerning its development and PDE use, aspects that might not be evident in either speech or traditional print.
For the internet data, I collected tokens of the variant spellings of fixing to, , and by performing a simple Google search. Obviously this approach glosses over some of the finer phonological detail. Both fixing to and fixin’ to are likely written by speakers who might use reduced forms such as [fina] or [fisa] in speech; however, finer-grained study of those forms awaits further research and a different methodology because neither [fina] or [fisa] has a conventionalized spelling that is machine searchable. , however, is the conventionalized spelling for the phonological variant [fma] and thus allows for a machine search and comparison with < fixing to> and < fixin’ to>. For each of the three spellings, I determined an approximately equal number of websites, about 100 each. Then, I visited each of the websites and collected every instance of < fixing to>, < fixin’ to> or occurring there. I included both instances of the BE fixing to VERB type and plain fixing to VERB without copular BE. The absence of copular be occurs in some cases because the periphrasis is functioning as an adjunct (e.g. Fixin’ to start dinner, Mary took some celery out of the fridge.) or a complement (He yelled at John for fixin’ to change the plan.}, and in other cases the copula was absent in the VP (We finna leave out of here early. In the end, my search yielded 273 tokens. Despite the equal number of websites used to collect data, the total number of tokens for each spelling differs significantly. In the end, there were 51 instances of < fixing to>, 71 of < fixin’ to>, and 151 of .
Interestingly, in no case did a website mix spellings and this fact is strongly suggestive of sociolinguistic stratification; < finna > is associated with varieties of African American English (AAE) while < fixing to> and < fixin’ to> appear to be the regular non-AAE spellings. The identification of a given form of as AAE or non-AAE is not intended to be about the ethnicity of a user. Indeed, such sociolinguistic boundaries have become blurred in PDE and especially in internet language; I suspect that many of the instances of that I studied were produced by Non-African Americans. Instead, ‘AAE’ and ‘non-AAE’ are more about the historical origins and spread of the construction (see e.g. Green, 2002). I will return to this aspect of the data below.
Having only 14 tokens of fixing to from the nineteenth century, one is reluctant to assign rigid constraints on its earliest uses. However, it is noteworthy that all of those early tokens involve telic verb situations like that given in above; that is they have an expressed end goal. None of those early tokens collocates with a non-telic verb such as those with sativa meanings. However, whereas the nineteenth century tokens affixing to show no uses in non-telic situations, the PDE tokens certainly do. Table 1 contrasts the occurrence of telic to that of non-telic situations in the nineteenth century and PDE internet data.
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