Today’s post begins by returning to a single term that appeared in my previous post, which focused on the language used to talk about preserving food in the Rocky Mountains. That term is a-canning, and the morphosyntactic phenomenon that it exemplifies is usually referred to as “a-prefixing.” A-prefixing features a sound phonetically transcribed as [ə] (as in the or duh without the initial consonant), typically represented by the letter a- in writing, that is affixed to the beginning of a verb, typically an active verb with a progressive ending, e.g. a-going or a-shooting.

Noted as a feature of American English as early as Wright (1895-1905), a-prefixing was targeted in early dialectological work done in the eastern United States by the Linguistic Atlas Projects (LAP). Based on data collected for the early LAP, Atwood (1953: 34-35) discussed a-prefixing with regard to the phrase singing and laughing, which had been directly elicited from informants by LAP fieldworkers; he found that although a-prefixing was used throughout the Atlantic states, “cultured” informants used it infrequently. In the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in a-prefixing among linguists studying the speech of the southern United States, particularly Appalachian varieties (e.g. Wolfram 1976; Feagin 1979). More recently, evidence of the use of a-prefixing in varieties of Western American English has been found in Colorado (Antieau 2003, 2006) and in Idaho (Launspach & Graham 2004; Launspach 2012 ).

In the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR), a-prefixing occurs 116 times in the speech of 35 informants (that is, exactly half of the LAMR informants used a-prefixing in their interviews). These 116 tokens represent 59 types, a “type” referring to a unique form (e.g. a-canning, a-coming, and a-going represent three types), and a “token” referring to each use of a type. The following figure shows all the verb forms with at least two tokens in LAMR, along with the number of speakers who used each form.

As shown, 20 a-prefixed types were used at least twice in the corpus, with a-going and a-coming being the most frequent (at 17 and 8 times, respectively), which were the same top-ranked variants found in a study of a-prefixing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Antieau 2001). There were also 29 a-prefixed types that occurred only one time apiece in the corpus, including our old friend a-canning. (Again, this pattern of “oncers” representing a majority or near-majority of a response set is something we will continue to find in our linguistic explorations.)

Geographically, our distribution of a-prefixers looks like this:

There seem to be no geographical patterning to the distribution of LAMR informants who used a-prefixing; rather, they appear to generally be everywhere in the region.

In terms of the social characteristics of a-prefixers in LAMR, a somewhat higher proportion of males to females used a-prefixing in LAMR (19 out of 34 males a-prefixed, as opposed to 16 out of 36 females), and males used about 61% of the total number of a-prefixes in the collection. Of the three educational levels I looked at (high school diploma, with no college; didn’t finish high school; attended college), those in the first group comprised nearly half of the total number of a-prefixers (n=17) and provided 45 of the tokens of a-prefixing in the corpus.

This exercise suggests that a-prefixing is a fairly productive practice among elderly speakers in rural communities in the Middle Rocky Mountains. While the data suggest that males are more likely than females to employ a-prefixes, education itself does not seem to be an important factor, as having more or less formal education than a high school diploma did not apparently dissuade or encourage greater use of a-prefixing in LAMR.

References

Antieau, Lamont.  (2006). A Distributional Analysis of Rural Colorado English. Athens, GA: University of Georgia dissertation.

Antieau, Lamont. (2003). "Plains English in Colorado." American Speech 78: 397-389.

Antieau, Lamont. (2001). “'I’m a-going to see what’s going on here': A-prefixing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Language and Literature 10(2): 145-157.

Atwood, E. Bagby. (1953). A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Feagin, Crawford. (1979). Variation and Change in Alabama English: A Sociolinguistic Study of the White Community. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Launspach, Sonja. (2012). "The journey to Idaho: The use of oral history tapes and census data to trace the history of regional dialect features." Idaho Yesterdays 53.

Launspach, Sonja, and Jenna Graham. (2004). “He dream of coming to a rich country”: From the archives, an exploration of the syntactic features of southeastern Idaho. Paper presented at the Midwestern Modern Language Association Meeting, St. Louis, Missouri, Nov. 4-7, 2004

Wolfram, Walt. (1976). "Toward a description of a-prefixing in Appalachian English." American Speech 51:45-56.

Wright, Joseph. (1898-1905). The English Dialect Dictionary: Being the Complete Vocabulary of All Dialect Words Still in Use, or Known to Have Been in Use during the Last Two Hundred Years. London: Henry Frowde.