From reduction to emancipation

In this paper I propose an emancipation effect that may follow from the ‘reducing effect’ of frequency (Bybee 2006): if a reduced realization of an item gains in frequency, it will become conceptually independent from the full form. In a context of grammaticalization, I show that this is the case for the form gonna, which is becoming emancipated from its source form going to. I use corpus data of spoken American English to trace the process of emancipation as gonna sheds off the features of phonetic reduction and acquires those of a lexical variant.