OntoSearch

Since the internet has opened up an crucial discourse space for < finna >, it has been instrumental in the development and covert acceptance of < finna > by providing a medium free of charge from the prescriptions of white, upper-class usage, a fact underscored by the relative frequency of < finna > in web texts. As stated earlier, my data collection from the net yielded 51 tokens of < fixing to> and 71 of . It is crucial to know that these numbers came from an exhaustive search of all of the websites that turned up for the spelling indicated once more about 100 every. Obviously not each and every instance of  represented the verbal Cartier Pasha Replica periphrasis (e.g. in the headline Price Fixing to be Prosecuted) and numerous websites contained texts that were repetitions of earlier searched sites. Thus in the case of < fixing to> or , the collectable tokens had been much less than the ca. 100 sites searched for every. Even so, my search of ca. 100 web sites with gave 151 tokens, meaning that despite repetition of texts (which was actually much more typically the case than with either < fixing to> or , often appeared numerous times in a single web-text. It need to be further noted that although I was able to exhaustively search the web for < fixing to> and , after my collection of 100 websites for , various hundred internet sites remained.

On the Fourth of July, an American couple awaits the birth of their 1st child in a private hospital room with a spectacular view overlooking San Francisco. A welcoming committee hands out red, white and blue party hats /and American flags. Far away, in Nacre, Ethiopia, a pregnant woman lies on a bed in a rural maternity ward. The sole doctor on duty, a Chinese woman, is attending to five expectant mothers, all suffering complications; two babies have already died on her shift this night, and one more was dead born.

I may mention too that while this study has not focused on speech, there are excellent indications that [fina] is highly frequent in spoken AAE varieties, and perhaps even a lot more frequent than the non-AAE forms in non-AAE Englishes. For instance, on 1 of the web sites visited for this study, the writer makes the observation regarding the frequency of [fma] read in (11). 11 Sorry for this depressing post, I believe the hospital makes me think of things like that alot [sic], that Replica Jaeger-LeCoultre and the insane frequency that black men and women say the word ‘finna’. Thus the internet data and, if the author of the text in (11) is accurate, possibly speech too, show [fina] to be a lot more frequent than non-AAE forms, a fact that indicates its more advanced grammatical age.

Data sources for language inquiry are notoriously problematized within linguistic theory. The advent and use of web text for data collection will surely only complicate the concern. Obviously web language neither can nor must be ignored. And in reality, I hope this paper has shown that data from the web can give us distinctive perspectives on particular aspects of language use that may well not be so obvious in much more traditional kinds of sources. In this way, we extend an understanding of the inter section of historical linguistic theory and text worlds. If that has been productive, then the advanced grammatical status for < finna > (e.g. [fina]) is evidenced not only by semantic distribution and formal shape, but also by its quite high frequency and broader acceptance in emerging web literacy.