An article published in 2014 argued that the third-person singular present tense indicative zero was already present in Norfolk English before the arrival of Dutch- and French-speaking immigrants in Norwich in the middle of the sixteenth century. This position differs from that of Trudgill, who has argued that zero-marking in Norfolk English arose as a result of language contact between the immigrants (or ‘Strangers’) and local English people. One response to the earlier article is that it relies on examples involving the verb have, and that this verb is something of an exception as it is found with zero-marking in other varieties of English. The present article addresses that concern by providing further evidence that zero-marking was already used in Norfolk English for verbs other than have before the arrival of the Strangers in Norwich. It then evaluates whether, although zero-marking was present prior to 1565, Trudgill’s language contact thesis may nevertheless help to explain how zero-marking became a common feature of Norfolk English and indeed of varieties of English elsewhere in East Anglia. In short, this article aims to shed further light on the interesting question of how and when zero-marking developed in Norfolk English.
I use the results of my own research into the language use of the immigrant (or ‘Stranger’) communities in early modern Norwich to evaluate Peter Trudgill’s thesis that it was language contact in Norwich between the Strangers and the local English inhabitants that led to the emergence of third-person singular present tense zero (he go rather than he goes). I present evidence that third-person singular zero was already in use in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk by the time when Dutch- and French-speaking immigrants arrived in Norwich. The question then arises as to whether language contact did in fact play any role in establishing zero-marking as the norm in the Norfolk dialect, a process which was complete by about 1700. I argue is that if language contact did play a role in the success of zeromarking, it would have been in a manner different to that described by Trudgill.
Summary Linguistic historiography analyzes how linguistic knowledge has been acquired, stored, used and diffused. This article examines what can happen if linguists rely on copies of source data rather than the source data itself. It takes as a case study linguistic data from Siraya, a now-extinct Formosan language. Documents compiled in the seventeenth century by Dutch missionaries in Taiwan form a significant source of data for Siraya. One such document, a wordlist known as the Utrecht Manuscript (UM), is the principal source for the lexicon of one variety of Siraya, “Siraya Proper”. It has been published three times. Each edition, however, contains many errors. These editions, rather than the manuscript, have been used by scholars investigating Siraya. This article aims to correct errors in the editions and secondary literature on the UM with my readings of the manuscript itself. It therefore presents a more accurate record of the lexicon of “Siraya Proper” as well as illustrating the importance of using primary rather than secondary sources of linguistic data. Finally, it introduces an online edition of the UM, which will provide scholars and language revivalists with a useful resource for this lexicon.
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