Variation in subject-verb concord in Early Modern English

Guy H. Bailey · Natalie Maynor · Patricia Cukor‐Avila

131 citations0/0 files storedLanguage Variation and Change

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Linguistic Variation and Morphology Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Determining the function of verbal -s in the Black English Vernacular (BEV) has been a major problem in sociolinguistics. Linguists have offered four answers to questions about the feature's origins and function, with -s seen as a case of hypercorrection, as a marker of durative/habitual aspect, as a variable marker of present tense (with the variation stemming from dialect mixture), and as a marker of historical present regardless of person and number. This article argues that confusion about -s results largely from four mistaken assumptions about it: (1) that -s did not exist in earlier varieties of BEV, (2) that the use of -s in the plural bears no relation to its use in the singular or to other processes such as the use of is as a plural or copula and auxiliary absence, (3) that -s has always functioned simply as a person/number marker in white vernaculars, and (4) that any role white vernaculars may have played in the variability of -s was a consequence of regional variation brought to the United States. This article addresses these assumptions by examining the function of -s, both in the singular and plural, and of plural is in the Cely Letters, written between 1472 and 1488, and by comparing the results to similar data in black and white vernaculars. The analysis shows that in the Cely Letters the presence of an NP subject strongly favors the occurrence of both singular and plural -s and also plural is. The same constraint operates on the same forms in older black and white vernaculars, and it affects copula and auxiliary absence as well. In the speech of younger blacks and whites, this constraint has begun to disappear as -s has become solely a marker of person/number agreement in white speech and as -s itself has disappeared in BEV.

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References

1975Language in the inner city: studies in the Black English Vernacular. By William Labov. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Pp. xxiv, 412. $6.95.1970A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. By Walter A. Wolfram. (Urban language series, 5.) Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969. Pp. xviii, 237. $5.00.1975Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular.1980Locating Language in Time and Space 1974Tense marking in Black English: a linguistic and social analysis. By Ralph W. Fasold (Urban language series, 8.) Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1972. Pp. xvi, 254. $7.00.1989There's no tense like the present: Verbal -sinflection in early Black English 1974The relationship of white Southern speech to Vernacular Black English 1989Exploring the Roots of Appalachian English

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2004Investigating Variation and Change in Written Documents 1993“The black men has wives and Sweet harts [and third person plural -s] Jest like the white men”: Evidence for verbal -s from written documents on 19th-century African American speech 1999Ethnolinguistic Marking of Past be in Lumbee Vernacular English 2013

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