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Part of
All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfaces
Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 377–394

Chapter 20
A-prefixing in the ex-slave narratives

| Professor Emerita, Marietta College

The speech of elderly African-Americans collected in the ex-slave narratives during the 1930s can enhance our understanding of both form and meaning of a-prefixing. Drawing on a selection of interviews that includes approximately 400 tokens of a-prefixing from over 100 individuals, this study will examine the types of words on which a-prefixing occurs, the phonological constraints on it, and the morpho-syntactic patterns in which it is more likely. From these interviews we can infer a semantic meaning of intensification for a-prefixing, especially in narrative contexts involving emotionally-charged events. This semantic meaning of a-prefixing may be related to the development of the progressive.

Keywords: a-prefixing, ex-slave narratives, AAVE, progressive
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Who uses a-prefixing?
    • 2.1Distribution of a-prefixing in time and space
    • 2.2African-American use of a-prefixing
  • 3.The ex-slave narratives
    • 3.1The ex-slave narratives as linguistic data
    • 3.2Description of corpus
  • 4.Form-based analysis
    • 4.1Forms to which a-prefixing attaches
    • 4.2Phonological constraints
    • 4.3Morpho-syntactic distribution of a-prefixing
  • 5.Meaning-based analysis
    • 5.1Intensive meaning
    • 5.2A-prefixing in narratives
  • 6.Coalescence of form and meaning: A-prefixing and the progressive
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 25 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.20ree
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