The Multi-layered PP Analysis and the Prefix a- in English

Abstract

This study presents a generative-linguistic analysis of the prefix a-in English morphology. Using Baker's (2003) theory of syntactic categories and Svenonius ' (2006, 2010) multi-layered analysis of spatial PPs, I argue that locative on-phrases underwent the process of grammaticalization to yield a-words in which the prefix a-realizes the category Pred. Denominal and de-adjectival a-words so formed triggered the emergence of a productive derivational pattern that produces stative predicates of the complex category Pred+A from inputs of any lexical category (N, A, and V). This analysis accounts for the non-canonical syntactic distribution of a-words as well as their morphological left-headedness.