The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in fourteenth-fifteenth-century Scots

Abstract

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.

Subject and adjacency effects in the Old Northumbrian gloss to theLindisfarne Gospels

“… 4 The operation of the NSR with be in northern Middle English militates against Benskin's (2011: 172) interpretation of the NSR as necessarily involving alternation between a plural suffix that is morphologically like that of the third-person singular and a plural suffix that is not. Furthermore, the scope of the NSR has been shown to extend beyond the plural; evidence of the NSR operating in the first-person singular is provided by Montgomery (1994: 83) and Fernández-Cuesta (2011, 2014) for northern Middle English and Early Modern northern dialect, and by King (1997: 175–7) and Rodríguez-Ledesma (2013) for Older Scots. See also García-Bermejo Giner & Montgomery (2003) for instances of the NSR with first-person pronoun subjects in late eighteenth-century Yorkshire English.…”