A comprehensive survey of a‐prefixing in Southern Appalachia

Abstract

AbstractThis article reviews research on so‐called a‐prefixing (she's a‐making good money now), attested among certain dialect speakers in Southern Appalachia. Sociolinguistic investigations of Southern Appalachian dialect speakers, beginning in the 1970s, found an interesting interplay of social and linguistic factors implicated in the variable production of the a‐prefix (Hackenberg, 1972; Wolfram, 1976; Wolfram and Christian, 1975, 1976; Feagin, 1979). Subsequent studies have confirmed many of these social and linguistic factors and have further shown generational differences in contextual uses of the form (narrative vs. nonnarrative contexts; Burkette, 2007). Additionally, researchers have employed case‐study methods, looking carefully at sociolinguistic interviews among members of the same family (Burkette, 2001, 2007, 2013, 2014, 2016; Hazen, 2006; Hamilton and Hazen, 2009; Hazen and Hamilton, 2008). These studies show effects for age and speaker education in use of the a‐prefix and further reveal how speakers draw on the form as a vernacular resource in identity work and stance‐taking.It is the interplay of these variegated factors that makes a‐prefixing a rich topic for linguistic inquiry: a‐prefixing allows analysts to probe not only the grammatical interfaces (i.e., phonology–morphology, morphology–syntax), but also the role of social and stylistic factors in a process involving these interfaces. Here, I review characteristics of existing studies, including methods of data collection, geographic locales investigated, informant characteristics (sex, age, and socioeconomic status), properties of the data (number of speakers, tokens, etc.), and types of analyses. Additionally, I survey social, stylistic, pragmatic, syntactic, and phonological factors that license or condition variable realization of the a‐prefix.