I dunno: A usage-based account of the phonological reduction of don't in American English conversation

Abstract

Formal theoretical mechanisms have been invoked to describe the variation of full and reduced forms of the English negative auxiliary don't. In actual usage, however, phonetically reduced alternates overwhelmingly appear in declarative constructions preceded by the first person singular pronoun followed by a small group of verbs whose meanings lend themselves to expressing speaker attitude in combination with I ( e.g. know, think). In these highly frequent environments, don't is dependent on surrounding material, and its phonetic reduction is part of a more general process of grammaticization of collocations such as I don't know which are highly frequent and exhibit a range of semantic and pragmatic functions in conversation. Such results support usage-based approaches to the investigation of linguistic structure, which by proceeding locally, are able to capture form-function regularities missed by more global structuralist methods.