Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T11:32:33.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2017

MARCELLE COLE
MARCELLE COLE*
Affiliation:
Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlandsm.p.j.cole@uu.nl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The subject and adjacency effects found to condition the distribution of present verbal morphology in northern Middle English, and commonly referred to as the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), are generally regarded to be an Early Middle English development that did not condition the distribution of verbal morphology in northern varieties of Old English (Isaac 2003; Pietsch 2005; de Haas 2008; de Haas & van Kemenade 2015). Using data taken from the tenth-century interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, this study considers variation between the present-tense markers -ð and -s in Late Old Northumbrian and discusses evidence which indicates that the subject and adjacency effects at the crux of the NSR were already operative in Old Northumbrian with different morphological material. The findings also debunk the traditional conviction that -s spread first to second-person plural contexts and only subsequently to the third-person plural and singular (Holmqvist 1922; Blakeley 1949/50; Stein 1986).

Keywords

Northern Subject RuleOld Englishverbal morphologynorthern EnglishmorphosyntaxOld Northumbrian
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 131 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This research has been financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (project FFI2011-28272). I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed comments on an earlier version of this article. Remaining errors are my own. This article draws from Cole 2014.

References

Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2001. Was/were-variation in Non-Standard British English today. English World-Wide 22, 1–21.Google Scholar
Bailey, Guy, Maynor, Natalie & Cukor-Avila, Patricia. 1989. Variation in subject–verb concord in Early Modern English. Language Variation and Change 1, 285–300.Google Scholar
Benskin, Michael. 2011. Present indicative plural concord in Brittonic and Early English. Transactions of the Philological Society 109, 158–85.Google Scholar
Bergen, Linda van. 2003. Pronouns and word order in Old English with particular reference to the indefinite pronoun ‘man’. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bergen, Linda van. 2008. Negative contraction and Old English dialects: Evidence from glosses and prose. Part I. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 109, 275–312.Google Scholar
Berndt, Rolf. 1956. Form und Funktion des Verbums im nördlichen Spätaltenglischen: eine Untersuchung der grammatischen Formen und ihrer syntaktischen Beziehungsbedeutungen in der großen sprachlichen Umbruchsperiode. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Blakeley, Lesley. 1949/50. The Lindisfarne s/ð problem. Studia Neophilologica 22, 15–47.Google Scholar
Britain, David. 2002. Diffusion, levelling, simplification and reallocation in past tense be in the English Fens. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6, 16–43.Google Scholar
Britain, David & Rupp, Laura. 2005. Subject–verb agreement in English dialects: The East Anglian Subject Rule. Paper presented at the Third International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE), Amsterdam, 24 June 2005.Google Scholar
Brown, Michelle P. 2003. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, spirituality and the scribe. London: The British Library.Google Scholar
Brunner, Alice. 1947/8. A note on the distribution of the variant forms of the Lindisfarne Gospels. English and Germanic Studies 1, 32–52.Google Scholar
Brunner, Karl. 1970. An outline of Middle English grammar, trans. Grahame Johnston. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. 2004. Dynamic typology and vernacular universal. In Kortmann, Bernd (ed.), Dialectology meets typology: Dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective, 127–46. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cole, Marcelle. 2008. What is the Northern Subject Rule? The resilience of a medieval constraint in Tyneside English. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval Language and Literature (SELIM) 15, 91–114.Google Scholar
Cole, Marcelle. 2014. Verbal morphosyntax in Old Northumbrian and the (Northern) Subject Rule. NOWELE Supplement Series. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cole, Marcelle. 2016. Identifying the author(s) of the Lindisfarne Gloss: Linguistic variation as a diagnostic for determining authorship. In Cuesta, Julia Fernández & Sanz, Sara M. Pons (eds.), The Old English gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, author and context (Buchreihe der Anglia), 168–88. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Corrigan, Karen, Beal, Joan & Moisl, Hermann. 2001–5. The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE). Newcastle University. www.ncl.ac.uk/necte/Google Scholar
Cukor-Avila, Patricia. 1997. Change and stability in the use of verbal-s over time in AAVE. In Schneider, Edgar W. (ed.), Englishes around the world I, 295–306. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Eisikovits, Edina. 1991. Variation in subject–verb agreement in inner Sydney English. In Cheshire, Jenny (ed.), English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives, 235–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Elliott, Constance & Ross, Alan. 1972. Aldrediana XXIV: The linguistic peculiarities of the gloss to St John's Gospel. English Philological Studies 13, 49–72.Google Scholar
Feagin, Crawford. 1979. Variation and change in Alabama English: Sociolinguistic study of the white community. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Fernández-Cuesta, Julia. 2011. The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in Early Modern English. Folia Linguistica Historica 32 (1), 89–114.Google Scholar
Fernández-Cuesta, Julia. 2014. The voice of the dead: Analyzing sociolinguistic variation in Early Modern English wills and testaments. Journal of English Linguistics 42 (4), 1–29.Google Scholar
Fernández-Cuesta, Julia & Rodríguez-Ledesma, Nieves. 2007. From Old Northumbrian to Northern Middle English: Bridging the divide. In Mazzon, Gabriella (ed.), Studies in Middle English forms and meanings, 117–33. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Filppula, Marku. 1999. The grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Forsström, Gösta. 1948. The verb ‘to be’ in Middle English: A survey of the forms. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.Google Scholar
García-Bermejo Giner, María F. & Montgomery, Michael (eds.). 2003. The Knaresborough Workhouse Daybook: Language and life in eighteenth-century North Yorkshire. York: Quacks Books and the Yorkshire Dialect Society.Google Scholar
Gelderen, Elly van. 2000. A history of english reflexive pronouns (Linguistik Aktuell 39). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Godfrey, Elizabeth & Tagliamonte, Sali. 1999. Another piece for the verbal-s story: Evidence from Devon in southwest England. Language Variation and Change 11, 87–121.Google Scholar
Stefan, Gries & Hilpert, Martin. 2010. Modeling diachronic change in the third person singular: A multifactorial, verb- and author-specific explanatory approach. English Language and Linguistics 14 (3), 293–320.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. 1988. Advanced VARBRUL analysis. In Ferrara, Kathleen et al. (eds.), Linguistic change and contact, 124–36. Austin: University of Texas, Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Haas, Nynke de. 2008. The origins of the Northern Subject Rule. In Dossena, Marina, Dury, Richard & Gotti, Maurizio (eds.), English historical linguistics 2006, vol. III: Geo-historical variation in English, 111–30. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Haas, Nynke de. 2011. Morphosyntactic variation in northern English: The Northern Subject Rule, its origins and early history. PhD thesis, Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Haas, Nynke de & van Kemenade, Ans. 2015. The origin of the Northern Subject Rule: Subject positions and verbal morphosyntax in older English. English Language and Linguistics 19 (1), 49–81.Google Scholar
Hamp, Eric P. 1975/6. Miscellania Celtica I, II, III, IV. Studia Celtica 10/11, 54–73.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer & Schreier, Daniel. 2004. Reversing the trajectory of language change: Subject–verb agreement with ‘be’ in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 16, 209–35.Google Scholar
Holmqvist, Erik. 1922. On the history of the English present inflection: Particularly -ð and -s. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Isaac, Graham. 2003. Diagnosing the symptoms of contact: Some Celtic-English case histories. In Tristam, Hildegard (ed.), The Celtic Englishes III, 46–64. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel E. 2009a. Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3, 359–83.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel E. 2009b. Rbrul manual. www.ling.upenn.edu/~jonson4/Rbul_manual.htmlGoogle Scholar
Kallen, Jeffrey. 1991. Intra-language transfer and plural subject concord in Irish and Appalachian English. Teanga 11, 20–34.Google Scholar
Keller, Wolfgang. 1925. Skandinavischer Einfluss in der englischen flexion. In Keller, Wolfgang (ed.), Probleme der englischen Sprache und Kultur: Festschrift Johannes Hoops, 80–7. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Kemenade, Ans van. 2009. Discourse relations and word order change. In Hinterhölzl, Roland & Petrova, Svetlana (eds.), Information structure and language change, 91–120. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kemenade, Ans van & Los, Bettelou. 2006. Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. In van Kemenade, Ans & Los, Bettelou (eds.), The handbook of the history of English, 224–48. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kendrick, T. D. et al. (eds.). 1960. Evangeliorum quattuor. Codex Lindisfarnensis, Musei Britannici Codex Cottonianus Nero D. IV. Lausanne: Olten and Graf.Google Scholar
King, Anne. 1997. The inflectional morphology of Older Scots. In Jones, Charles (ed.), The Edinburgh history of the Scots language, 156–81. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Klemola, Juhani. 2000. The origins of the Northern Subject Rule: A case of early contact? In Tristram, Hildegard (ed.), The Celtic Englishes II, 329–46. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
Kotake, Tadashi. 2008. Differences in element order between Lindisfarne and Rushworth Two. In Amano, Masachiyo, Ogura, Michiko & Ohkado, Masayuki (eds.). Historical Englishes in varieties of texts and contexts: The global COE programme, international conference 2007 (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 22), 63–77. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Taylor, Ann & Ringe, Donald. 2000. The Middle English verb-second constraint: A case study in language contact and language change. In Herring, Susan, van Reenen, Pieter & Schoesle, Lene (eds.), Textual parameters in older languages, 353–91. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja, 1993. Third person present singular verb inflection in Early English and American English. Language Variation and Change 5, 113–39.Google Scholar
LAEME: Laing, Margaret. 2013. A linguistic atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.htmlGoogle Scholar
Larsson, Kent. 1988. Den plurala verbböjninge i äldre svenska. Uppsala: Institutionen för Nordiska Språk vid Uppsala Universitet.Google Scholar
McCafferty, Kevin. 2003. The Northern Subject Rule in Ulster: How Scots, how English? Language Variation and Change 15, 105–39.Google Scholar
McCafferty, Kevin. 2004. ‘[T]hunder storms is verry dangese in this countrey they come in less than a minnits notice. . .’: The Northern Subject Rule in Southern Irish English. English World-Wide 25, 51–79.Google Scholar
McIntosh, Angus. 1989. Present indicative plural forms in the later Middle English of the North Midlands. In McIntosh, Angus & Laing, Margaret (eds.), Middle English dialectology: Essays on some principles and problems, 116–22. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael. 1994. The evolution of verb concord in Scots. In Fenton, Alexander & McDonald, Donald (eds.), Studies in Scots and Gaelic: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Languages of Scotland, 81–95. Edinburgh: Canongate.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael. 1997. Making transatlantic connections between varieties of English. The case of plural verbal -s. Journal of English Linguistics 25, 122–41.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael, Fuller, Janet & DeMarse, Sharon. 1993. ‘The black men has wives and sweet hearts (and third person plural-s) jest like the white men’: Evidence for verbal-s from the written documents on 19th century African American speech. Language Variation and Change 5, 335–57.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael & Fuller, Janet. 1996. What was verbal-s in 19th century African American English? In Schneider, Edgar W. (ed.), Focus on the USA, 211–30. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Murray, James A. H. 1873. The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland. London: Philological Society.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 2000. The third person singular -(e)s and (e)th revisted: The morphophonemic hypothesis. In Dalton-Puffer, Christiane & Ritt, Nikolaus (eds.), Words: Structure, meaning, function: A festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky, 235–48. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 2003. Historical linguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman Linguistics Library). London: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Ogura, Mieko & Wang, William S-Y.. 1996. Snowball effect in lexical diffusion: The development of -s in the third person singular present indicative in English. In Britton, Derek (ed.), English historical linguistics 1994, 119–41. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Orton, Harold, Barry, Michael, Dieth, Eugen, Halliday, Wilfrid, Tilling, Philip & (eds, Martyn Wakelin.). 1962–71. Survey of English dialects. Leeds: Arnold.Google Scholar
Pietsch, Lukas. 2005. ‘Some do and some doesn't’: Verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles. In Kortmann, Bernd, Herrmann, Tanya, Pietsch, Lukas & Wagner, Susanne (eds.), A comparative grammar of British English dialects: Agreement, gender, relative clauses, 125–209. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Tagliamonte, Sali A.. 1989. There's no tense like the present: Verbal -s inflection in early Black English. Language Variation and Change 1, 47–84.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Tagliamonte, Sali A.. 2001. African American English in the diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2009. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. www.R-project.orgGoogle Scholar
Rodríguez-Ledesma, María Nieves. 2013. The Northern Subject Rule in first person singular contexts in fourteenth–fifteenth-century Scots. Folia Linguistica Historica 34,149–72.Google Scholar
Ross, Alan S. C. 1934. The origins of the s-endings of the present-indicative in English. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 33, 68–73.Google Scholar
Ross, Alan S. C., Stanley, E. G. & Brown, T. J.. 1960. Some observations on the gloss and the glossator. In Kendrick et al. (eds.), vol. II, book II, part I, 5–33.Google Scholar
Samuels, Michael. 1985. The Great Scandinavian Belt. In Eaton, Roger (ed.), Papers from the Fourth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 41, 269–81. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schendl, Herbert. 1996. The third plural present indicative in Early Modern English: Variation and linguistic contact. In Britton, Derek (ed.), English historical linguistics 1994: Papers from the 8th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, 143–60. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schendl, Herbert. 2000. The third person present plural in Shakespeare's First Folio: A case of interaction of morphology and syntax? In Dalton-Puffer, Christiane & Ritt, Nikolaus (eds.), Words: Structure, meaning, function: A festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky, 263–76. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie & Wolfram, Walt. 1994. Convergent explanation and alternative regularization: Were/weren't leveling in a vernacular English variety. Language Variation and Change 6, 273–302.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. & Montgomery, Michael. 2001. On the trail of early nonstandard grammar: An electronic corpus of southern U.S. antebellum overseers’ letters. American Speech 76 (4), 388–410.Google Scholar
Schreier, Daniel. 2002. Past be in Tristan de Cunha: The rise and fall of categoricality in language change. American Speech 77, 70–90.Google Scholar
Shorrocks, Graham. 1999. A grammar of the dialect of the Bolton area. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Skeat, Walter W. (ed.). 1871–87. The Holy Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions, synoptically arranged, with collations exhibiting all the readings of all the MSS.; together with the early Latin version as contained in the Lindisfarne MS., collated with the Latin version of the Rushworth MS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stein, Dieter. 1986. Old English Northumbrian verb inflection revisited. In Kastovsky, Deiter & Szwedek, Alexander (eds.), Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries, vol. 1: Linguistic theory and historical linguistics, 637–50. Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Stein, Dieter. 1987. At the crossroads of philology, linguistics and semiotics: Notes on the replacement of th by s in the third person singular in English. English Studies 68, 406–43.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2009. There was universals; then there weren't: A comparative sociolinguistic perspective on ‘default singulars’. In Filppula, Markku, Klemola, Juhani & Paulasto, Heli (eds.), Vernacular universal and language contacts: Evidence from varieties of English and beyond, 103–29. Oxford and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2010. Investigations in sociolinguistics: Stories of colonisation and contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Visser, F. T. 1963–73. An historical syntax of the English language, 3 parts, 4 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt & Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1996. Dialect change and maintenance in a post-insular island community. In Schneider, Edgar W. (ed.), Focus on the USA, 103–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wright, Laura. 2002. Third person plural tense markers in London prisoners’ depositions 1562–1623. American Speech 77 (3), 242–63.Google Scholar
Wright, Laura. 2015. Some more on the history of present-tense -s, do and zero: West Oxfordshire, 1837. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 1 (1), 111–30.Google Scholar