Variation in subject-verb concord in Early Modern English

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.

Variability in negation in African American Vernacular English

“…Compiled from data provided in 13. See Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila (1989) for an analysis of the effects of this constraint on the use of verbal -s in early modern English. 14.…”

Ethnolinguistic Marking of Past be in Lumbee Vernacular English

“…The NP > pronoun effect is also significant in that it aligns this variety with a diachronically recurrent constraint pattern for subject-verb concord in English (Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila 1989;Montgomery 1989Montgomery , 1994Tagliamonte 1997; Smith and Tagliamonte forthcoming). 3 The VARBRUL analysis for regularization to weren't is given in Table 5.…”

Stativity and Copula Absence in AAVE

“…The syntactic and semantic reanalysis of zero and full/contracted copula forms by post-World War II Springville speakers bears a striking resemblance to another grammatical development within the present tense of be, the grammaticalization of be 2 (Bailey andMaynor 1987, 1989;Cukor-Avila and Bailey 1995), the near-categorical loss of present-tense verbal -s (Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila 1989;Cukor-Avila 1997), and the post-World War II reanalysis of had+past as a simple past-tense form (Cukor-Avila 1995;Cukor-Avila and Bailey 1995). 6 Bailey andMaynor (1987, 1989) argue that the emergence of invariant be+V+ing as a marker of habitual aspect was largely a consequence of three things: (1) structural pressures within the progressive system itself, which in English can have a number of meanings (habitual, durative, and future) that are not progressive at all; (2) the presence of variant auxiliary forms of be in English (e.g., is/º/be) that were not distinct from one another in function; and (3) the presence of an earlier invariant be in black folk speech, one that derived from the deletion of a preceding would and carried past habitual meaning.…”

“…They point out that in earlier AAVE, -s and º both occurred in the plural as well as the singular, with their occurrence conditioned not only by the person/number of the subject but also by whether the subject was an NP (which favored -s) or a personal pronoun (which favored º); in other words, two functions were competing for the same form. In most Southern white vernaculars, this competition was resolved in favor of person/number agreement; Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila (1989) argue that in AAVE, it was resolved by the near elimination of the form for which the functions were competing. The work of Cukor-Avila (1995 provides strong support for these hypotheses and details the path by which -s disappeared.…”