Nonstandard gotta in British English
Nonstandard gotta in British English

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the nonstandard gotta from the point of view of orthography and grammar. Using two corpora, the BNC and the GB sub-corpus of GloWbe, the convergence of gotta with other nonstandard spellings is discussed alongside its grammatical behavior (in terms of inversion, negation, auxiliary use), which is different from that of the core English modals. However, on semantic grounds alone, gotta can be considered an emerging modal. The final section of the article is dedicated to gotta in computer-mediated language, motivated by its presence in the latter corpus, which covers gotta on the Internet. It is concluded that gotta may also be seen as an illustration of an emerging orthographical norm that represents actual speech due to the freedom conferred by the Internet which creates the ripe communicative context for such a norm to surface.

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