Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule.

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This volume provides both a quantitative statistical and qualitative analysis of Late Northumbrian verbal morphosyntax as recorded in the Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It focuses in particular on the attestation of the subject type and adjacency constraints that characterise the so-called Northern Subject Rule concord system. The study presents new evidence which challenges the traditional Early Middle English dating attributed to the emergence of subject-type concord in the North of England and demonstrates that the syntactic configuration of the Northern Subject R.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule; Editorial page ; Title page ; LCC data ; Dedication page; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; List of figures; List of tables; Abbreviations; Chapter 1. Introduction; Chapter 2. Old Northumbrian; 2.1 Old Northumbrian textual sources; 2.2 The authorship of the Lindisfarne glosses; 2.2.1 Palaeographical evidence; 2.2.2 Linguistic evidence; 2.3 The language of the Lindisfarne glosses ; 2.4 The sociolinguistic situation; 2.5 Present tense markings in Old Northumbrian; 2.6 Accounting for the origin of the -s ending.

2.6.1 Phonological and phonetic factors2.6.2 Analogical levelling; 2.6.3 Scandinavian influence; 2.7 Summary; Chapter 3. A diachronic overview of the (Northern) Subject Rule; 3.1 The Subject Rule in the North of England and Scotland; 3.1.1 Northern Middle English and Middle Scots; 3.1.2 Northern Early Modern English to Present-Day English; 3.2 The Subject Rule outside the North; 3.2.1 Early Modern London English; 3.2.2 Southwestern varieties of English; 3.2.3 Irish English; 3.3 The Subject Rule beyond the British Isles; 3.3.1 North American varieties; 3.3.2 African American Vernacular English.

3.4 The Subject Rule and the verb be3.4.1 Processes of was/were-levelling in Present-Day English; 3.4.2 Levelling and subject effects in other Germanic languages; 3.5 Summary; Chapter 4. A variationist study of -s/-ð present-tense markings in Late Old Northumbrian; 4.1 Data and methodology; 4.1.1 Methodological preliminaries; 4.1.2 Data collection and coding; 4.1.3 Explanatory variables; 4.1.4 Methods; 4.2 Grammatical person, subject type, number, person and adjacency effects; 4.2.1 Overview of Old English subject types; 4.2.2 Grammatical person effects.

4.2.3 Subject type, person and number effects4.2.4 The distribution of subject effects in Lindisfarne and its implications ; 4.2.5 Adjacency and word order effects; 4.2.6 Summary; 4.3 Phonological conditioning factors; 4.3.1 Following phonological environment; 4.3.2 Inflectional vowel weakening and syncope; 4.3.3 Preceding phonological environment; 4.3.4 Results for phonological environment; 4.3.5 Summary; 4.4 Priming effects; 4.4.1 Morphosyntactic priming; 4.4.2 Priming effect of Latin verbal inflection; 4.4.3 Summary; 4.5 Lexical conditioning and lexical frequency effects.

4.5.1 Measuring token frequency4.5.2 Results; 4.5.3 Summary; 4.6 Discussion; Chapter 5. Reduced verbal morphology in late Old Northumbrian; 5.1 Reduced inflection in Old English dialects; 5.2 Reduced present tense inflection in the Lindisfarne gloss; 5.2.1 Present-indicative interrogative forms; 5.2.2 Imperative forms; 5.2.3 Present indicative forms; 5.2.4 Summary; 5.3 The historical source of present-indicative -e/-Ø; 5.3.1 Subjunctive verbal morphology; 5.3.2 Preterite-present verbal morphology; 5.3.3 Preterite verbal morphology; 5.4 Summary.

English.

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