The aim of this article is to study the extension of genitive singular ‑es from the a-stems to other noun classes in the gloss to the Durham Collectar (Durham, Cathedral Library, A.iv.19). To this end a quantitative analysis of sixty-five nouns has been carried out in contexts where they gloss a Latin genitive form. The nouns have been selected on the basis that their etymological inflection for the genitive singular is other than ‑es, and they consist of feminine nouns (nouns ending in ‑ung, nouns ending in ‑ness, ō‑stems, i‑stems), kinship r‑stems and weak nouns or n‑stems. The results of the analysis of the Durham Collectar are compared with those found in the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library, Nero D.iv) with three main purposes: first, to determine the degree of similarity between the two glosses; second, to establish whether Durham is more conservative or not with regard to this feature, and finally, to contribute to the discussion on the question of authorship.
The article focuses on the operation of the Northern Subject Rule in the firstperson singular in early Scots. It establishes that the first-person singular was under the scope of the NSR in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, with a near-categorical operation of the Proximity-to-Subject Constraint. In addition, it reveals the strength of this constraint, which in recent literature has generally been assumed to be less robust than the Type-of-Subject Constraint. A comparison with Northern Middle English suggests that Scots was more advanced in the operation of the NSR.
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