The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in early Modern English

• Julia Fernández Cuesta ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Sevilla

     Universidad de Sevilla

     Sevilla, España

     
• Localización: Folia lingüística histórica, ISSN 0168-647X, Vol. 32, Nº 1, 2011, págs. 89-114
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • One of the most salient features of northern English and Scots is the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), a grammatical constraint that governs present-tense verbal morphology according to the type and position of the subject. Although most accounts of the NSR refer only to the plural, there is evidence that the constraint also affected the first-person singular, giving rise to a system in which all plural persons and the first-person singular have verbal -s unless adjacent to a personal-pronoun subject, in which case the present indicative marker is zero or the -e suffix. We aim to demonstrate that the NSR in first-person-singular contexts was operative in the North in early Modern English and is documented until the eighteenth century in northern English and Scots. As regards the origin of the NSR in this context, analysis of the LAEME data for the North shows that there were signs of the adjacency constraint in all persons of the present indicative, including the first-person singular, during this period. However, the adjacency constraint appears to have been less robust than the type of subject constraint. As the effect of subject type is relevant only in third-person plural contexts, this might explain the strength of the constraint in this context and the attention that third-person plural contexts and the NSR have received in the literature at the expense of other environments, such as the first-person singular