'I'm a-going to see what's going on here': a-prefixing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Abstract

This article examines a-prefixing as it occurs in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and compares it to the a-prefixing data collected by dialectologists and sociolinguists, particularly those presented by Wolfram in his work on nonstandard dialects of American English. Although the two sets of data prove to be similar in most respects, there is a difference in how a-prefixes pattern in coordinate constructions. In this article, I illustrate how this difference could occur as the result of the process of grammaticalization.