Present-day Standard English has little subject-verb agreement morphology. Historically, all verbs were marked for person and/or number in the present and past tense indicative paradigms. This is illustrated by the Middle English data in (1a–b) for the 2nd sing. (thou) and the 3rd pl. (thei). In the course of the Middle English period, however, most of this agreement marking was lost as a result of the operation of various phonetic changes, the tendency towards the levelling of different forms and the dropping of weak vowels, final –n, and so on (see Fisiak (1968: 90–99) for a detailed overview of the different stages in this development). Currently, in the present tense indicative, the verb is inflected with –s only when the subject is 3rd sing. (compare (2a–c)). As shown in (3a–b), in the past tense, only the verb to be has retained distinctive singular and plural forms. By contrast, lexical verbs have a uniform –ed ending across the past tense paradigm (3c–d):
(1) | a. | Thou partest nat so lightly, by Seint John. (14thC The Pardoner’s Tale, Chaucer; in Mossé 1952: 98) |
‘You sha’n’t depart so easily, by St John.’ 1 | ||
b. | [m]any prophetis and kyngis wolden … heere tho thingis, that ȝe heere, and thei herden not. (c1384 WBible(1); in the Middle English Dictionary) (2011–2014) | |
‘[m]any prophets and kings have desired … to hear the things which you hear, and have not heard them.’ 2 | ||
(2) | a. | She goes there all the time, you know. (Clarke 1997: 232) |
b. | People says ‘yeah but look at your weather, you gets it freezing cold in the winter, you get_ all the rain.’ | |
c. | They call_ ’em something like a battlehead or something … (both from Godfrey and Tagliamonte 1999: 89) | |
(3) | a. | She was here … about three months ago … |
(Tagliamonte and Smith 1999: 9) | ||
b. | So you were all—you were all just bairns. (example from Smith 2000; cited by Adger 2006: 512) | |
c. | Right away I called the children to send a car … | |
d. | Yes, since they killed him. (both from Tagliamonte and Poplack 1993: 179, 192) |
It has been noted that many varieties of English demonstrate a use of verb forms that differs from the contemporary Standard English system. In this volume, we will focus on four major non-standard uses: verbal –s, verbal zero, past tense forms of the verb to be (past BE) and verbal –s in existential there sentences. These uses are illustrated in (4–7) below, respectively. Verbal –s (in (4)) is the use of the suffix –s in contexts that extend beyond the 3rd sing., which in contemporary Standard English is the only grammatical person where –s is permitted. Verbal zero (in (5)) is the opposite: the absence of the –s ending in 3rd sing. contexts. 3 Past BE (in (6)) is variation in the distribution of was and were; for example, use of was in plural contexts where Standard English uses were. Verbal –s in existential there sentences (in (7)) has been shown to warrant separate treatment (Tagliamonte 1998, amongst others) and involves –s usage with a plural subject.
(4) | Verbal – s |
The children shouts all the time. (Belfast English; Henry 1995: 20) | |
(5) | Verbal zero |
that’s what make us so cross. (Tristan da Cunha; Schreier 2002: 23) | |
Past BE | |
(6) | We wasna getting a house at the time. (Buckie; Smith and Tagliamonte 1998: 106) |
Existential there sentences | |
(7) | There’s some pork pieces left up there too. (New Zealand English; Britain and Sudbury 2002: 218) |
We will henceforth use ‘verbal –s’ as a cover term to refer to these four non-standard usages in varieties of English. 4
Three questions immediately arise in relation to verbal –s:
- 1.If verbal –s is not used as an agreement morpheme, what is it?
- 2.How has verbal –s come to be used for purposes other than for agreement marking?
- 3.Why is verbal –s used for these other purposes?
Over the past years, these questions have been addressed in research in the fields of language variation and change (henceforth: LVC), where it has received much attention, dialectology (e.g. the Survey of English Dialects; Orton and Dieth 1962–1971), historical linguistics (e.g. Holmqvist 1922), and to a lesser extent formal linguistics (e.g. Chomsky 1995) and functional grammar (e.g. Hannay 1985). So have historical linguists demonstrated that in Old English, –s was originally the ending of the 2nd sing. but acquired an extended use across the present indicative paradigm in northern England in the tenth century (Holmqvist 1922: 3–4). LVC-researchers have shown that verbal –s is deployed in a particularly rich variety of ways around the English-speaking world, many of which have roots deep in the history of English. Today, contemporary vernaculars show further uses of verbal –s which add to these historical patterns and compete or coexist with them in an apparent situation of ‘layering’ (Hopper 1991). Attested functions of verbal –s include: the Northern Subject Rule (NSR; Ihalainen 1994: 221) by which verbal –s may be used with 3rd pl. NP-subjects but not with adjacent pronouns; marking habitual aspect, narrative turns, or polarity; and constructing social identity (Clarke 1997; Rodríguez Louro and Ritz 2014; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1994; Cheshire 1982, respectively, and many others whose work we will address here). Formal linguists (like Henry 1995; Mittelstaedt and Parrott 2002; Adger 2006 and others discussed in this volume) have inquired into properties of the language system that play a role in the occurrence of verbal –s.
Whilst a great deal of research has been devoted to documenting and studying verbal –s all around the Anglophone world, there have not been, as Godfrey and Tagliamonte (1999: 88) point out, ‘any conclusive or unifying explanations for verbal –s … This suggests that verbal –s may have been reinterpret...