That last post made me think about wanna, and now I’m a little confused. How grammatical do each of the following seem to you?
(3) a. I want to be adored
b. I wanna be adored
(4) a. You want to be adored
b. You wanna be adored
(5) a. He wants to be adored
b. He wanna be adored
(6) a. She wants to be adored
b. She wanna be adored
(7) a. They want to be adored
b. They wanna be adored
My intuitive judgments are that all the a sentences are OK, while 5b and 6b are very bad, and 7b is pretty bad. It turns out Google agrees that 5b and 6b are much worse than 3b and 4b, but it also thinks 7b is bad. But all the forms are used widely enough that they seem kinda acceptable at least to some. Here are the counts for searching for pronoun followed by “want to” or “wanna”.
want to wanna RatioI 10,600,000 2,390,000 4.4You 16,400,000 1,510,000 10.9He 1,760,000 11,800 149.2She 816,000 16,500 49.5They 4,030,000 79,400 50.8
79,400 is many more hits than I expected for a phrasing I regard as marginal, an 28,300 between ‘he’ and ‘she’ is way more than I expected for a phrasing I regard as clearly bad. At least the ratios were way down than from ‘I’ and ‘You’.