Abstract
This chapter discusses a-prefixing in terms of its syntactic privileges, its phonological constraints and its semantic content. An adequate description of the structure and function of the form must deal with these levels of organization. To provide an adequate database for the analysis of a-prefixing, many tape-recorded samples have been obtained from Mercer and Monroe counties, located in the south-western part of West Virginia. The examination of the syntactic privileges of a-prefixing in the preceding paragraphs demonstrates that the affix is restricted to -ing forms that function as verbs or adverbs. The delimitation of the syntactic privileges of a-prefixing given does not account for all restrictions on it. There is rather an intersection of syntactic and phonological phenomena. Descriptions of a-prefixing by william a. Stewart, R. Hackenberg and Crawford Feagin have all focused on the potential semantic distinctiveness of a-prefixing as a part of the verbal system of English.
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