"The city was a thousand years a-building."
What does "a-building" (in building) modify in that sentence?
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Abuilding is a predicative adjective meaning that something is in the process of being built. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as being chiefly North American. It seems to be quite rare, with only seven records for it in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
Barrie England
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You'd expect to find it in some rural dialects, so it's more common than a word mainly used by intellectuals that appears only seven times in COCA. – Peter Shor Feb 22 '14 at 14:14
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@Peter: I suppose Witter Bynner counts as an "intellectual" (that Wikipedia link says he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University). But certainly Robert Graves accepts his usage as "poetry" in I'm a-building my house On a mountain so high, A good place to wait For my love to come by. "Imitative dialectal", I'd say. – FumbleFingers Feb 22 '14 at 14:46
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... And a-building is hardly adjectival here. The a is probably a lyrical filler. A-Hunting We Will Go is a well-known stanza, and is surely a rearrangement of We will go (a-)hunting. There is justification for regarding a-hunting as an archaic -ing form (present participle here). The OP usage of a-building sounds more verbal than adjectival to me, but the usual* modern non-agentive intransitive usage of build is equivalent to build up: 'opposition was rapidly building'. I'd suggest the non-passive near-equivalent: "The Elbonians took a thousand years building the city. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 22 '14 at 15:38
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- There are some examples of ergative usage on the web: 'One day, during the time when the factory was building ...'
– Edwin Ashworth Feb 22 '14 at 15:41
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It is an old form of the present participle. 'He was a-running, she was a-courting, they were a-building a house, it was a-raining.
It means 'in the process of' doing something.
It is still used in some regional dialects in Britain e.g. in Norfolk. 'What are yew a-dewun on'? meaning 'What are you a-doing of'?, or simply 'What are you doing?'
WS2
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I would dare to say that "a-building" is no adjective and "a-hunting no participle but an old gerund form with the rest of a preposition as prefix.
a) We went a+hunting. Compare German: Wir gingen zum Jagen (word-for-word translation: We went to the hunting.) So we may assume that in English "to hunting" was reduced to "a-hunting". These old forms of a- + gerund can be found in older literature.
Occasionally you find expressions such as "A storm was brewing". In this expression "brewing" has no active meaning but rather a reflexive meaning. One might give the idea by saying: "A storm was brewing itself". And such expressions were at first used with a preposition such as "in/on/at". Let us assume it was: A storm was in (the act of) brewing itself.
This is meant to give an understanding of such curious expressions as in the above sentence: "The city was a thousand years a-building."
rogermue
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