Reconsidering the Semantics of A-Prefixing

Abstract

IN MY PREVIOUS TREATMENT OF aprefixing in sentences such as He was ahuntin' and a-fishin' or He come a-runnin', I resolutely took the position that there was no formal evidence for a distinct semantic category of aprefixing, contrary to some current (Wolfram 1979, 55). At that point in the analysis of aprefixing, I was intent on showing that the available proposals for a unique aspectual marking function were formally unjustified. Proposals that the aprefix functioned as an indefinite marker (Stewart 1972), an intermittent marker (Hackenberg 1972), and an immediacy marker (Feagin 1979) were all considered but rejected on the basis of critical counterexamples and formal syntactic argumentation. Arguments against these proposals still stand, and will not be repeated here (see Wolfram 1979 and 1980 for the argumentation), but it is now time to reopen the semantic file on aprefixing. Although I have yet to uncover a unique semantic category associated with the use of the aprefix, I must now concede the possibility that this form may fill some special, albeit nonunique function in conversational discourse. From such a vantage point, several proposals for the semantics of aprefixing have to be considered. One possible meaning of this form is 'intensification', that somewhat vague label used to denote increased focus on the predication involving the aprefixed -ing form. Does the use of the aprefix intensify the action and specify 'dramatic vividness' of the predication, as Feagin (1979, 114) originally suggested? Unfortunately, intensified action is difficult to delimit, since it often exists on a continuum and frequently is tied in with the context of a discourse rather than the singular use of a form. How then, can we test the intensity hypothesis? Dwight Bolinger (personal communication), encouraged by the success of my original sentence pair selection task (Wolfram 1982) for confirming the parameters of aprefixing, suggested that a comparable selection task might be set up in which dimensions of intensity were tested. The hypothesis is that a sentence indicating intensified action would be chosen for aprefix attachment over one without such intensification. With this in mind, I constructed a selection task in which a number of different contrastive