Different ways of pronouncing "have to" and how they come about

What is it about?

If we say "wanna" for "want to" and "gonna" for "going to", why not "hava" for "have to"? We look at how people reduce to word 'to' in 'have to' in American English and find three main variants: "havto", "havta" and "havda". The variant "havda" is the most reduced. It occurs mostly in rapid flows of speech, so the reduction is probably due to fast articulation. This means that the difference to "wanna" and "gonna" is that these are word-like items that we can choose to use in spoken language, whereas "havda" is rather an imprecise pronunciation of 'have to'.

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Why is it important?

Usage-based theories of language are seeing a discussion on how we memorize frequent combinations of words (e.g. 'don't know', 'have to') as units (so-called chunks), very much like single words. Words can be reduced in pronunciation; we can memorize different pronunciations as variants of a word, and a speaker can decide to use a given variant. So the question is how this works for chunks that are made up of more than one word but can be used like a single word. 'Have to' is an interesting example because it is very frequent and shows parallels to known cases like 'going to'/'gonna' and 'want to'/'wanna'-