Among the chief characteristics of the northern dialects since Middle English times has been the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a systemic split in the verbal concord system which allows for invariant verbal-s forms everywhere except when the verb is directly accompanied by a simple personal pronoun. This study provides a geographical and comparative survey of the reflexes of this pattern in the northern dialects, drawing attention to their variability and to their interaction with other related and/or competing patterns of concord variation. A corpus investigation reveals that over and above the 'hard' constraints that define the Northern Subject Rule as such, there exist a number of 'soft' probabilistic constraints governing its effects which are also near-universally shared between the varieties in question. I then go on to discuss the likely paths of historical development that have given rise to this grammatical pattern, and critically review some attempts that have been made to account for it in terms of formal syntactic theories. I show that existing formal models fail to account for the range of variability of this pattern, both in a comparative, diatopic perspective and on the level of individual speakers. I finally argue that variation phenomena of this kind can theoretically be better accounted for in a usage-based model in the vein of current functionalist and emergentist theories.
Perfects of the type I have my dinner eaten are a well-known feature of Irish English dialects. They can be linked to a functionally similar construction in Irish, of the type tá mo dhinneár ite agam (literally "is my dinner eaten at-me"), but also to earlier constructions in Standard English. The issue has sometimes been treated as a competition between two seemingly mutually exclusive explanations, a "substrate" and a "retentionist" hypothesis.This dichotomy can be overcome on the basis of a model of "contactinduced grammaticalisation" (Heine/Kuteva 2005): an existing source structure in the receiving language (English) expands along normal paths, but under a triggering effect of a contact language (Irish), ultimately leading to an apparent duplication of a foreign model.Empirical data comes from historical 18th/19th century corpus material. It provides evidence about the chronology and sociolinguistic setting in which the relevant changes took place. It supports a scenario where both Irish-English bilingualism and exposure to the English source constructions played crucial roles.
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