Subject-verb agreement and the rise of do-support in the period of anglicisation of
Scots
Scots subject-verb (S-V) agreement is historically distinct from that of (Standard) English, as Older Scots
employed a version of the Northern Subject Rule (NSR). It has been suggested that the NSR is a
similar last-resort operation to do-support (de Haas 2011),
giving rise to the question of whether do-support entered grammar competition with the NSR when it
emerged in Scots. Using the new Parsed Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (1540–1750), this study
explores the presence of these S-V agreement strategies in 16th–18th century Scots, and investigates the possibility
that NSR constraints influence the trajectory of Scots do-support. The findings indicate that the NSR
declines as do-support emerges in the PCSC data, but apparently without interference
from subject type constraints.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1The origin and anglicisation of Scots
- 2.2Do-support
- 2.3The Northern Subject Rule
- 2.4The NSR and do-support in Scots
- 3.Hypothesis
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Corpus
- 4.2Retrieving results: Querying
- 4.3Retrieving results: Quantifying
- 5.Results
- 5.1The NSR in the PCSC
- 5.2Do-support in the PCSC
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
-
Acknowledgments
-
Notes
-
References