Assignment on wanna contraction
(Appropriate for beginning and intermediate undergraduate syntax students. Please feel free to modify
and use in linguistics classes; all I ask is that you cite both me and Karins & Nagy 1993. Also make sure
that the survey method used here has your institution’s IRB approval for classroom use.)
Marjorie Pak
Emory University
mgpak@emory.edu
Assignment Part 1
Recruit four native English speakers age 18 or over – not current LING-201 students, and ideally not
linguistics majors – to participate in a very short survey. Participants will need access to a computer
where they can play sound clips from a website. This survey was created by Naomi Nagy and A. Krisjanis
Karins, and next week in class we’ll read their paper, compare our pooled results to theirs, and discuss
some of the implications of this study for syntactic theory.

Tell each participant that this is a two-minute survey you’re conducting for a linguistics class, that
they will remain completely anonymous, that their participation is voluntary, and that they can
back out at any time. (If they want to know exactly what the study is
looking at, you can explain it to them after we’ve discussed it in class.)
Once they’ve agreed…

Have each participant go to one of the following URLs:
www.marjoriepak.com/story1.html
www.marjoriepak.com/story2.html
Send half of the participants to the first URL and half to the second.
(Don’t send anyone to both!) The webpage will have a short story to
listen to and a question to listen to and answer. Participants can listen to
the story and question as many times as they want.

If you’re interviewing a single person, they can give you their answer
orally and you can write it down. If you’re interviewing 2+ people at the
same time, you should have them each write their response on a separate
piece of paper (try to discourage them from discussing their responses
until everyone’s written them down).

Record each person’s age, sex, and home state (or have them write it
with their response).

Fill out and submit a Wanna Survey on Blackboard (see right) for each
of your 4 speakers.
Assignment Part 2
For the last assignment, you conducted a survey where respondents had to answer the question
Who would you want to help? As pointed out in class, this question is ambiguous: the word who can be
interpreted as either the subject of help (the ‘helper’) or the object of help (the ‘helpee’). Here are two
‘deep structure’ sentences for the question, one corresponding to each interpretation:
Marjorie Pak, Emory University
1
i. You would want who to help (who interpreted as subject)
ii. You would want to help who (who interpreted as object)
a. Here is a tree showing one way in which the question
Who would you want to help? could be derived. Which
of the deep structures above does this tree correspond to?
b. Draw a tree showing how the other meaning of Who
would you want to help? is derived. You can either show
the whole derivation in a single tree, as is done here, or
draw two separate trees – one with the deep structure and
one with the surface structure. Hint: The deep structure
will be very similar to the tree we did in class for the
sentence I would want the policewoman to help me.
As discussed in class, it is possible for the words want and to to
combine into the contracted form wanna. However, it has been
claimed that wanna-contraction is categorically prohibited (i.e.
impossible) if the trace of a wh-word intervenes between want and
to.
want + to
want + t + to
→
→
/
wanna
* wanna
a. If this is true, only one of the two trees from the previous question will be pronounceable as Who
would you wanna help?Which tree is it? ________
Read Karins and Nagy (1993) ‘Noncategorical perception of a categorical rule’
(http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/ngn/pdf/Wannapaper2003.pdf). Note that the tables and figures
appear at the end of the paper. Briefly answer these questions:
a. Do Karins & Nagy find that wanna-contraction across a trace is indeed prohibited 100% of the
time? If not, what do they find instead?
b. Why didn’t Karins & Nagy simply distribute a questionnaire asking people directly if
Who would you wanna help you is grammatical?
c. To what extent do our class’s main results align with Karins & Nagy’s? Compare the table below
(summarizing our class’s results) to Table 1 in the Karins & Nagy paper.
Story 1
Story 2
Marjorie Pak, Emory University
old lady/
mailman
33 (37.5%)
57 (69.5%)
90
policewoman/
big guy
55 (62.5%)
25 (30.5%)
80
88
82
170
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