The times they are a-changin'

Question

I have always been intrigued by the word usage in the title of this Bob Dylan song. Wikipedia mentions that the song was influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads:

Dylan recalled writing the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the moment. In 1985, he told Cameron Crowe: "This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads ...'Come All Ye Bold Highway Men', 'Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens'. I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.

• Is there a dialect where the form a-<gerund> is common? e.g. a-cooking, a-cleaning, etc.
• If so, in what context would you use the form a-<gerund>?

Answer 1

The a- prefix is a reduction of Old English an/on, meaning on, used to express progressive aspect.

English used to have more of a distinction between present simple and present progressive; what we now say as “the times are changing” was expressed in Old English as “the times change”. In order to emphasise the progressive aspect (the times are currently in the process of changing), you would have said “the times are on the change”. I believe this is related to some set phrases such as “on the run”.

The usage is still current in in Dutch as aan het (“Ik ben aan het lopen” = “I’m walking”). In English it’s now used almost exclusively in poetry—normally music, and folk music at that—since it provides a convenient way to fill out a syllable and tweak the stress pattern of the sentence. I don’t know of any English dialects that have it in everyday speech.

Answer 2

It is not true that English doesn't have any widely spoken dialects that use this.

Further, you leave out a big part of the story: "A-" before a verb was a prefix quite common in 16th C. English. It is still, today, quite common in Appalachian English, in the US, which is where Dylan no doubt took his influence.

It can mean "engaged in", as in "He's a-runnin! And fast!", or "She's a-birth, and there's no point in hoping she'll not."

It can also mean "motion to, into", as in "I'm going a-long", "I'm going a-bout", "I'm going a-round", "I'm going a-breast".

Being a colloquialism, its usage is largely regional, and so hasn't gotten enough attention to register on my personal "research radar" -- I, having lived in/come from Appalachia, find it rather intuitive. But my linguistic skills aren't sharp enough to describe precisely how the usage might work, unfortunately.

This is the sort of thing that, if you want to know how it's used, you've got to move to the place where it's spoken and hear it in speech for yourself.

Answer 3

I grew up in East Tennessee, and there the 'a-' prefix before the present participle (never the gerund) was in common use and still is in limited use, although now mostly by older people. I'm acomin', Hit's arainin' hard, He's a runnin' for it - all those and many more were common. [The Hit's is not a typo - in some positions, 'hit' was used instead of 'it.' Don't remember all the local ground rules, but as an initial word in a sentence, 'hit' was common.

One phrase that was often heard was 'I'm afixin(g) to,' used instead of 'I'm going to.' There was a shade of meaning difference there.

I'm goin' to go to Jonesborough = I will go to Jonesborough in the future. I'm afixin' to go to Jonesborough = I am preparing at this minute to go to Jonesborough in the immediate future.

Answer 4

This phenomenon has been studied and observed mostly in predominantly white speech communities speaking Southern American White English in Alabama, West Virginia and east Tennessee; it is unclear if it is used by speakers of other ethnicities. A-prefixing has also been observed in Scotland, Ireland and parts of England. Some argue that a-prefixing in Appalachian English originated from the variety spoken by settlers from southern England. In Appalachian English, a-prefixing is used by speakers of all ages. However, in some other dialects, such as Ozark English, the phenomenon is not used by younger individuals.

As for the purpose of a-prefixing, some have suggested that it could be a "stylistic indicator of vernacular style". They have also proposed that a-prefixing has a "stylistic function of intensity". Historically, the prefix has been said to derive from the loss of the -n in the preposition on used in Early Middle English.

In the example listed above in the question, the -ing suffix indicates that the verb is in the progressive aspect (describing a continuous action). This is the most common context in which a-prefixing is seen. It also tends to occur mostly with verbs which begin in a stressed syllable, although this is not the case in all varieties of English. A-prefixing is actually incompatible with nominal forms such as gerunds (nouns formed with the -ing suffix), as in I enjoy a-swimming. It is also incompatible with adjectives ending in -ing and objects of prepositions (except the second verb of a coordinated prepositional phrase). Additionally a-prefixing cannot occur with verbs beginning in vowels, which is probably one reason (of many) that Bob Dylan didn’t call the song The times they are a-altering, which would be an unnatural use of a-prefixing.

Answer 5

Another possible explanation is in terms of epenthesis: roughly, the insertion of a new sound as part of a process of phonetic change.

Here's a speculative hypothesis of how this may have come about in the kind of example you're talking about... Consider the examples he's going, she's changing, he's running.

The phoneme immediately before the verb in all these cases is a [z].

Now, consider that sometimes the end of one syllable ends up actually being pronounced as the first element of the following syllable. For instance, many Canadian and British speakers pronounce the phrase "none at all" in a way that others technically hear as "none a tall".

If a similar phenomenon were going on with the examples above, we might have phonetic breaks occurring before the [z] in such a way that the consonantal clusters [zg], [ztʃ], and [zr] would be formed for he's going, she's changing, he's running.

But those clusters don't occur in English at the start of freestanding words. So to prevent that from happenings, speakers might insert an [a] (actually more of a schwa if you think about it).