Variation in subject-verb concord in Early Modern English

ABSTRACTDetermining 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.