Entries for ima in Urban Dictionary reveal a wide range of attitudes on the construction, from it being an "[a]wesome" example of "triple elision" (second entry, as of this writing); to its serving as evidence of laziness among Americans in their speech habits, as well as being a fun thing to say (fourth entry); to it being a "bastardization" used by speakers of "ebonics." From a linguistic perspective, I'ma is simply a reduction of I'm gonna (Green 2003: 59; Cable 2013: 154), and while often associated with African American English, it does not, like other linguistic features, have a one-to-one correspondence with a specific social group.* Of greater relevance to this post is that H. Samy Alim has mentioned use of the construction in several of his articles on Hip-Hop music and culture (e.g. Alim 2009).

Here I take a look at the use of I'ma in my collection of Billboard's year-end Top Ten songs (1951-2015). As in my earlier post on a-prefixing in pop music, at this point I am at the mercy of the people (as well as computers, I suppose) who transcribed and submitted songs to the various sites that I downloaded from to have gotten I'ma right, as I am still in the process of editing the entire collection for accuracy. However, an analysis of a sample of these files suggests that I'ma was represented faithfully in the corpus.

In all, I'ma appears 65 times in 26 songs in the collection. The figure below shows the songs that include I'ma, the number of times it is used in each of these songs, and the number of unique verbs that it precedes in each.

Fig. 1: # of times I'ma occurs in each song (in blue) and # of unique verbs it precedes in each song (in red) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 1: # of times *I'ma* occurs in each song (in blue) and # of unique verbs it precedes in each song (in red) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

The average number of uses of I'ma per song in the subcorpus is 2.5, and the mode is 1. The greatest number of uses in a single song is 11 in "Check on It" (2006). The greatest number of unique verbs that I'ma precedes in a song is three, which is the case for two songs, both from the 2007 charts: "Buy you a drank" (buy, let, take) and "I want to love you" (get, pick, stick). The mode for this category is also one.

Use of I'ma rather than I'm going to is not an all-or-nothing affair in the collection: Of the 26 songs that include the former construction, 7 also include the latter. And in these cases, the ratio of I'ma to I'm going to is across the board, as illustrated by the extremes of "Check on it" (11:1) and "Tha Crossroads" (1:6). In one noteworthy example, "Love Song" (2008) includes two instances of the line "I'ma need a better reason" but eight instances of the line "I'm not going to write you a love song." It would be hasty to infer from this tiny amount of data that I'ma cannot occur in, say, negated sentences, rather than some other variable factoring into its absence. However, it is certainly worth considering and perhaps speaks to the need for more research on the grammaticality judgments of I'ma users before writing off such notions. It should also be noted that while there can be alternation of I'ma and I'm going to in a specific song, there is no song in which the two constructions alternate before a specific verb, which may be an important clue to the kinds of verbs that I'ma can precede, or at least those that it has a tendency to co-occur with.

As to the nature of these verbs, they are presented in the figure below, which also shows how many songs each occurs in and how many times.

Fig. 2: Verbs preceded by I'ma, as well as # of songs each occurs in and # of times (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 2: Verbs preceded by *I'ma*, as well as # of songs each occurs in and # of times (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As can be seen, the mode for both the number of songs that a verb is preceded by I'ma and the number of times that it happens is one. Of the four verbs that appear in more than one song and that are used more than once, let has the highest performance. It should be noted that no verbs beginning with a vowel appear on the list, which has been noted as being characteristic of a-prefixed verbs as well.

In the final figure of this post, I show how the frequency of I'ma, in terms of the number of songs it occurs in and the number of times it is used in these songs, has changed over time, since its earliest appearance in the collection in 1996 to now.

Fig. 3: Frequency of use of I'ma by # of songs and # of instances over time (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 3: Frequency of use of *I'ma* by # of songs and # of instances over time (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As the figure shows, I'ma was slowly introduced into the songs that I'm focusing on in the last half of the 1990s, before sputtering out around the turn of the century and being revived -- and peaking, at least for the time being -- in the middle aughts. Although it declined near the end of that decade, its use once again spiked in 2010, and, after becoming invisible in 2014, showed new signs of life in 2015. It will be interesting to see if and how I'ma will play a part in the most popular songs in American music in the second half of the current decade.

As a conclusion, several mentions of the topic of a-prefixing were made in this post, and in a future post I will talk more about the relationship of I'ma and a-prefixing. However, another feature that I have reported on in previous posts, and one that is of particular interest to at least one of my readers, emerged from my data here, so I wanted to point out that "I Wanna Love You" (2007) blends both I'ma and a personal dative into a single line: "I'ma get me a shot before the end of the night."

---------------------------------------------------

*For instance, in "In the Electric Mist" (2009), Tommy Lee Jones and John Goodman use I'ma on several occasions, apparently as a means for presenting their characters as Louisiana natives.

References

Alim, H. Samy. (2009). Translocal style communities: Hip-Hop youth as cultural theorists of style, language, and globalization. Pragmatics 19(1): 103-127.

Cable, Thomas. (2013). A Companion to Baugh and Cable's History of the English Language, 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Green, Lisa. (2004). Syntactic and semantic patterns in child African American language. In W. F. Chiang, E. Chun, L. Mahalingappa, and S. Mehus (eds.) Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Symposium About Language and Society, Texas Linguistic Forum 47: pp. 55-69, Austin: University of Texas.