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ENGLISH
PORTUGUESE LINGUISTICS & CULTURE |
Autor: | PPAULO |
E-mail: | não-disponível |
Data: | 24/AGO/2010 2:11 AM |
Assunto: | a-courting...a-verbing |
Mensagem: |
Yup, I agree. And I split it in two posts aiming to avoid confusion in the learner head.
Then comes the a- verbing. The author may have chosen this wording because the verbs coming after the a- are often ended in ''ing". A-verbing it is "something that has survived from the past; "a " is a holdover from earlier varieties of English, but it is familiar to modern readers from nursery rhymes and folk songs, both old and modern . . . That is, it is a remnant/vestige/residue/remainder of the old English, in the sense of earlier English talked in the states (and the U.K.) at the time. I equally deemed interesting the following piece of text, kinda informative: : "Wolfram and Fasold (1974), who studied the use of a-verbing in Appalachian English in West Virginia, say that the prefixed -a emphasizes the duration of an action. 'She's working' means that she's engaged in a relatively short-term task. 'She's a-working' means that the task is of longer duration. . . . Feagin (1979) [found that] a-verbing was used to intensify the action or to create dramatic vividness. She found that a-verbing forms were common in stories about ghosts, accidents, murders, tornadoes, and other dramatic topics."
I don´t know much about etimology, but perhaps ''asea/ashore'' might come from structures like that? I really don´t know for certain...but it may be one possibility. Indeed, this was an inteligent question from the (very) scratch! |