Chapter 20
A-prefixing in the ex-slave narratives
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.
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