"wanna" at the end of a sentence

Question

I'm not a native speaker. A pupil wrote "wanna" at the end of a sentence:

You can go if you wanna.

It sounds odd to me, as if something had to follow wanna (as opposed to want to/ want, which can stand alone)?

Please note that this question is not asking about the acceptability of 'wanna' as a written 'analogue' of 'want to' in general. That has already been thoroughly covered in other questions, notably in various answers at kinda sorta coulda shoulda lotta oughta betcha tseasy etc. This is solely about the acceptability of ending a sentence with 'wanna'.

Answer 1

"Wanna" can, in conversation, be an extremely casual spoken substitute for either "want a" or "want to". "I wanna watch" can either mean "I want a [wrist] watch" or "I want to watch [something]". If "want to" is the meaning intended, then "wanna" can stand anywhere that the more formal phrase can. Except in direct speech, such contractions as "wanna", "gonna", "coulda", "shoulda", etc, have no place in written English that aims for any level of formality above street-talk, and this should, in my opinion, be your concern as a teacher.

Answer 2

To be clear, I understand your question to be primarily about grammar as it applies to pronunciation, not primarily about spelling, since you said "it sounds odd to me". There are certainly grammatical rules about the pronunciation of contractions, weak forms and other things that native English speakers often ignore or just think of as "lazy", "careless" or "sloppy" pronunciation. For example, Wilson left a comment mentioning the often-discussed linguistic fact that some speakers feel that they cannot use "wanna", or that "wanna" would sound odd, in sentences like "Who do you wanna win the game?", where the subject of the infinitive following "want to" is different from the subject of the verb "want" (the comment links to https://www.princeton.edu/~browning/wanna.html). (I said "some" because my impression is that there may be more variation between speakers in this area than is commonly acknowledged.)

"You can go if you wanna" sounds acceptable to me

Maybe some people feel differently, but for me, "wanna" (which I use as a written representation of a particular pronunciation of "want to"; something like [wɑnə] or [wɑɾ̃ə]—this is just an impressionistic transcription, not the result of rigorous phonetic analysis) can stand alone at the end of a sentence just as well as "want to".

Grant Goodall ("Contraction") seems to describe a few relevant examples, but unfortunately says we don't have very good data about their acceptability:

Pullum (1997) points out that in principle we should be able to look for such evidence by examining the behavior of wanna vs. want to in constructions where an overt element in T is required. VP ellipsis (as opposed to null complement anaphora) and VP fronting are two such constructions. Examples of the latter are given in (9).

(9) a. I said I'd wash the dishes, and wash them I did.
b. *I said I'd help wash the dishes, and wash them I helped.

If wanna involves no overt element in the embedded T, we would then predict that (10b) would be worse than (10a).

(10) a. I said I'd feel like climbing the mountain, and climb it I want to.
b. I said I'd feel like climbing the mountain, and climb it I wanna.

Pullum reports that unfortunately, judgments on sentences like these are so unclear and inconsistent to be of little use (and similar results obtain with examples involving VP ellipsis), so at this point it is an open question whether it is possible to find evidence for or against the presence of to in the clause embedded under wanna.

If I remember correctly, some linguists have analyzed the "particle" to that is used before infinitives in English as an auxiliary. If that analysis is correct, perhaps an analogous example would be the weak pronunciation of have in sentences like "You should have" (this weak pronunciation of "have" can be represented in writing as "You should've", which is an informal spelling but which I would say is not considered a misspelling, or as "You should of", which is fairly common in informal contexts, but commonly considered a misspelling).

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That said, nohat♦'s answer to "Is there some rule against ending a sentence with the contraction “it's”?" quotes a section of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002) which apparently indicates that in the authors' judgement a strong form is needed in a similar sentence:

They want me to resign, but I don’t intend [to __].

I'm not sure how to explain the discrepancy between this and my judgement of sentences like "You can go if you wanna". It may be possible that to usually has a strong pronunciation in this context, but the contraction wanna is an established alternative to want to.

"Another Argument Against Wh-Trace" (Ivan A. Sag) seems to indicate that Pullum has in fact proposed that there is something special about wanna and similar words:

the arbitraryness of the set of verbs to which it applies: gonna, hafta, *intenna (intend to), *lufta (love to), *meanna (meant to). Indeed, as Pullum (1997) shows in detail, the optimal analysis of this entire class of verbs involves no rule of 'Wanna Contraction'—wanna forms are morphologically derived. The relevant morpholexical rule applies to seven verbs that select for a single infinitival complement; hence transitive want (which selects for two complements) has no such form. Pullum's analysis explains all phenomena previously discussed in the literature, as well as further data that serve to distinguish his proposal from others that have been advanced.

[...] Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1997. The Morpholexical Nature of English to-Contraction. Language 73: 79–102.

However, it seems Pullum's account has been criticized by Hans C. Boas ("You Wanna Consider a Constructional Approach towards Wanna-contraction?", 2004).

The spelling "wanna" is often stigmatized in any context

Another entirely separate issue is the appropriateness in general of the spelling "wanna". As other people have mentioned, many people find the spellings "wanna" and "gonna" inappropriate in any context in any but the most informal writing (I would say it's most likely to be tolerated in online chat rooms or in fictional dialogue). It's never incorrect to write "want to" instead of "wanna", and it's unlikely that any reader will find the spelling "want to" to be overly formal, so you should advise your students to get out of the habit of writing "wanna".

Note that avoiding spellings like "wanna" and "gonna" doesn't necessarily mean that you should try to avoid the corresponding pronunciations: I use the pronunciation [wɑnə] or [wɑɾ̃ə] much more often than I use the spelling "wanna". Many English words and phrases have reduced pronunciations ("weak forms") that are not typically indicated in writing, and that native speakers may not even realize they are using. See the Language Log post Ask Language Log: Writing "gonna" or "going to" (Mark Liberman) for some more relevant information.

Answer 3

It's just a short way of saying 'want to', so it doesn't need something to follow after it as it can stand alone. It isn't formal English.

Answer 4

You can go if you want to [implied to go].

[see explanation below] A standard, full-sentence in English would be:

You can go if you want to go.

You can go if you wanna. [colloquial only, spoken only, never in formal writing]

The TAKEAWAY: Spoken versus written English

In spoken English, one does not have to repeat a predicate from the main clause in many cases, when the predicate after the to would be the same phrase as in the main clause's predicate. This is especially true of verbs of these verbs: want, wish need, have and expect. This has a technical name which I cannot recall now, but they are basically verbs expressing volition of some kind.

You can stop now if you have to [stop now]. They will arrive late if they want to [arrive late] You will find out if you need to [find out]. He works late whenever he wishes to [work late]. Don't leave early unless you expect them to [leave early].

It is perfectly fine to speak this way, and every English speaker does, however, in a formal written text one would not:

• The armies battled for months along the river though their respective generals did not expect them to.

There are those who assert that that sentence is OK. Nevertheless, were it my thesis I was writing, I would write:

• The armies battled for months along the river though their respective generals did not expect them to do so.

In order to cut down on unwieldy sentences, one can substitute "to do so" (or say so, etc.) to avoid unwieldy repetition. However, the repetition is always implied.

One last word: A honest linguist recognizes that "wanna" exists. And linguists do not care about whether some grammarian establishment thinks its "acceptable" or "not".

[Unfortunately, the bolding and italics here won't work for me.]

Answer 5

While I always thought it's incorrect, a misspelling, it is actually listed by multiple dictionaries. The definitions listed are (some only list the first, this will be indicated below):

1:short form of want to

2:short form of want a

More interesting, I think, is to compare what else the different dictionaries say about it. A quick overview:

Cambridge Dictionary lists it as not standard.

Oxford Dictionary Online lists it as informal.

Merriam Webster Dictionary only lists the first definition and emphasises that the term is informal.

Collins Dictionary only lists the first definition and emphasises that it's spelled as it is pronounced and that the word is informal.

American Heritage Dictionary lists it as informal.

Macmillan Dictionary only lists the first definition and describes it as short form and informal.

Answer 6

Wanna is normally considered a nonstandard spelling. It’s a phonetic spelling of a common pronunciation in American English, but a transcript of someone who pronounced “want to” or “want a” that way would normally correct the spelling, like it would normally leave out uh and um. If you saw somebody’s dialogue spelled that way in a novel, the connotation would be that the character is childish. So I would suggest you teach your students to avoid that spelling.

There are some people who also think it’s an error to end a sentence with want to, because they believe a preposition should not be “stranded” without an explicit object. (I have also heard an older shibboleth against ending a sentence with a preposition, but that appears to be completely defunct.) I personally consider that a hypercorrection: that rule was made up by analogy with Latin grammar centuries ago, and has no basis in either the spoken language or the usage of many of the best English writers. Winston Churchill made fun of how comically stilted following this rule can sound when he said that ending a sentence with a preposition was something “up with which I shall not put.”

I would take out my red pen and correct “wanna” to “want to.”

Answer 7

I am about to disagree with what has been posted before and won't even be able to cite references. I know that spells ill luck, but at least I'll give a reasoning.

"wanna" is an informal contraction. It does not stand at the same level as "I'm" or "I'd" which are perfectly valid non-colloquial speech. It is a half-phonetic spelling of quite colloquial speech.

"You can go if you wanna." is incongruous in the complexity and order of its elements, and the place of the contraction is at the end of an utterance where it doesn't serve a purpose in not distracting from what's following it.

It's similar to "This is either not going to break, or it's.": the abbreviation makes breathing and thinking room for a continuation the absence of which is irritating.

More coherent would be "You wanna go, just go.": not only does the "wanna" contraction have an actual infinitive following it, the whole abbreviated conditional falls more in line with the overall informality.

Now "wanna" in itself is not fit for written speech but of course will serve as a transcription of colloquial speech. Colloquial speech as a transcription of an imagined or factual utterance is not bound to grammaticality or rhyme or reason. Flagging "character incoherence" on the writings of a young person would be excessive.

So I don't see that you have lots of options other than flagging "wanna" as improper speech/grammar/spelling irrespective of the particular strangeness of this particular use.