Regional Variation in Early Modern English: The Case of the Third-Person Present Tense Singular Verb Ending in Norfolk Correspondence

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 338-366
Author(s):  
Christopher Joby
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Third ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Thomas Browne

A well-known example of variation in Early Modern English is found in the morphology of the third-person singular present tense indicative verb. In general terms there was a gradual shift from - th to - s (e.g., pleaseth to pleases). However, previous studies such as Kytö (1993) and Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) found that this shift was by no means uniform, varying by, for example, region, type of text, and author. More specifically, Nevalainen, Raumolin-Brunberg, and Trudgill (2001) analyzed the distribution of endings for the third-person singular present indicative verb in Early Modern East Anglian English, i.e., the variety of English used in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. However, for the final twenty-year period of their study (1660-1680), they only have four informants. This article analyzes the distribution of verb endings for a larger number of informants during this period, which marks the final stages of - th recession in East Anglian English, using letters written in Norfolk. The corpus based on these letters allows for a detailed analysis of linguistic and extralinguistic factors that influenced this distribution. Linguistic factors include the stem-final sound and verb-type ( have, do, and say are analyzed separately). Among the extralinguistic factors analyzed are the sex of the author and addressee, the level of formality, and the author’s social class. One of the informants in this study is Sir Thomas Browne. The distribution of verb endings in his correspondence makes him an outlier. His usage has led some authors to exclude his results from their analysis. The present article offers a new approach to dealing with such cases. The overall results are compared with those for other parts of England from the same period in order to identify patterns of regional variation. Finally, an analysis of correspondence for the period 1680-1750 indicates that by this time - th had more or less disappeared from Norfolk correspondence.

Third-person singular zero in Norfolk English: An addendum

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Joby
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
The Third ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
The Third Person

Abstract An article published in 2014 argued that the third-person singular present tense indicative zero was already present in Norfolk English before the arrival of Dutch- and French-speaking immigrants in Norwich in the middle of the sixteenth century. This position differs from that of Trudgill, who has argued that zero-marking in Norfolk English arose as a result of language contact between the immigrants (or ‘Strangers’) and local English people. One response to the earlier article is that it relies on examples involving the verb have, and that this verb is something of an exception as it is found with zero-marking in other varieties of English. The present article addresses that concern by providing further evidence that zero-marking was already used in Norfolk English for verbs other than have before the arrival of the Strangers in Norwich. It then evaluates whether, although zero-marking was present prior to 1565, Trudgill’s language contact thesis may nevertheless help to explain how zero-marking became a common feature of Norfolk English and indeed of varieties of English elsewhere in East Anglia. In short, this article aims to shed further light on the interesting question of how and when zero-marking developed in Norfolk English.

Third-person present singular verb inflection in early British and American English

1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merja Kytö
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
American English ◽  
Distribution Patterns ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
Text Type ◽  
The Third ◽  
Verb Inflection ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

ABSTRACTThis study concentrates on the development of the third-person indicative present singular verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English. Within the framework of sociohistorical variation analysis, corpus-based comparisons focus on a number of extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of the forms over successive periods of time. During the period studied, the main line of development is the replacement of the -th by the -s ending; the zero from is clearly in decline, as is the use of the -s and the -th endings in the third-person present plural inflection. The type of the verb (notably have and do vs. other verbs) and stem-final sounds play an important role in the choice of the form. The text type, the level of formality, and the sex of the author can also be seen to influence the distribution patterns. The -s ending had already been firmly established in everyday usage before the settlers left for the New World. Contrary to what has usually been attributed to the phenomenon of “colonial lag,” the rate of change was more rapid in the colonies than in the mother country.

Number puzzles

English Today ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-55
Author(s):  
Paul Rastall
Keyword(s):  
Number Agreement ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Made In

Number in English is a puzzling phenomenon – not least for foreign learners, and often also for those who have to teach them. Avowedly ‘Standard’ forms of English are in something of an in-between stage. The so-called ‘singular/plural’ distinction is only partly a question of distinguishing one as opposed to more than one, while number agreement in the verb is inconsistent and not always predictable from the apparent number of the subject – as in The team was[?]/were[?] unhappy about losing the game. While some Germanic languages, and some varieies of English, have altogether discarded verbal agreement in number, standard varieties of English redundantly retain traces of it: He was, and they were, happy to hear the news. As Jespersen has put it (1979:216), ‘No distinction is made in verbs between the two numbers except in the present tense and there it is found in the third person only…. [I]n the preterit we have the solitary example was, plural were….’

Four grammatical features of Saudi English

English Today ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maather Al-Rawi
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
World Wide ◽  
The Third ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
The Third Person

Saudi English (also called ‘Arabicised-English’ by Al-Shurafa, 2009) is probably one of the least studied varieties among the ‘New Englishes’. This paper aims to provide an introduction to the main syntactic features of the variety. In order to do this I will use the list of features discernible in varieties of English world-wide as ascertained by two scholars working actively on the typology of the different Englishes, Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi (2004). They use the term ‘angloversals’ for recurrent non-standard features widely found in English across the globe. This paper investigates three such ‘angloversal’ features which I believe to be widespread in Saudi Arabia: (a) #57: deletion ofbe; (b) #17: irregular use of articles; and (c) #53: invariant present tense forms due to zero marking for the third person singular (Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi 2004: 1146–7). This article also aims to study the effects of the Arabic substrate on the variety of English spoken in Saudi Arabia. The occurrence of the features is investigated among different strata in the society.

Kafka's Eternal Present: Narrative Tense in “Ein Landarzt” and Other First-Person Stories

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorrit Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Distance ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Third ◽  
Present Experience ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
The Third Person

Many of Kafka's stories in the first person either use the present tense throughout or shift from past to present in the course of narration. The stories told entirely in the present render the inner monologue of a speaker caught in a durative psychic struggle; the stories in which the tense changes tell of a past calamity that leads to an everlasting predicament. “Ein Landarzt” is structured on an “einmal-niemals” pattern, and thus belongs to the second of these general types; but in this story Kafka also tries—again by shifting to the present tense—to achieve within the narration of past events the immediacy of present experience. He thereby effaces the demarcation between outer event and inner reflection and eliminates the temporal distance between the narrating and the experiencing self. This use of the present tense results in mutually exclusive verbal gestures and contradictory temporal references. The stylistic incongruities in “Ein Landarzt” thus point up the difficulties of rendering the immediacy of experience in a first-person narrative, and help to explain why Kafka usually preferred to use the third person in his novels and novellas.

Effects of Light-Hearted and Serious Entertainment on Enjoyment of the First and Third Person

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Hofer
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Media Consumption ◽  
First Person ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Third Person Effect ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Perceived Enjoyment ◽  
The Third Person

Abstract. This was a study on the perceived enjoyment of different movie genres. In an online experiment, 176 students were randomly divided into two groups (n = 88) and asked to estimate how much they, their closest friends, and young people in general enjoyed either serious or light-hearted movies. These self–other differences in perceived enjoyment of serious or light-hearted movies were also assessed as a function of differing individual motivations underlying entertainment media consumption. The results showed a clear third-person effect for light-hearted movies and a first-person effect for serious movies. The third-person effect for light-hearted movies was moderated by level of hedonic motivation, as participants with high hedonic motivations did not perceive their own and others’ enjoyment of light-hearted films differently. However, eudaimonic motivations did not moderate first-person perceptions in the case of serious films.

Causal determinism and a totally global fatalism from the third-person perspective

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyang Yu
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Causal Determinism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Neural Substrate ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
The Third Person

The human brain and the human language are precisely constructed together by evolution/genes, so that in the objective world, a human brain can tell a story to another brain in human language which describes an imagined multiplayer game; in this story, one player of the game represents the human brain itself. It’s possible that the human kind doesn’t really have a subjective world (doesn’t really have conscious experience). An individual has no control even over her choices. Her choices are controlled by the neural substrate. The neural substrate is controlled by the physical laws. So, her choices are controlled by the physical laws. So, she is powerless to do anything other than what she actually does. This is the view of fatalism. Specifically, this is the view of a totally global fatalism, where people have no control even over their choices, from the third-person perspective. And I just argued for fatalism by appeal to causal determinism. Psychologically, a third-person perspective and a new, dedicated personality state are required to bear the totally global fatalism, to avoid severe cognitive dissonance with our default first-person perspective and our original personality state.

scholarly journals Deictic Shifting in Greek Contractual Writing (I–IV AD)

Philologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Klaas Bentein
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

AbstractMuch attention has been paid to ‘deictic shifts’ in Ancient Greek literary texts. In this article I show that similar phenomena can be found in documentary texts. Contracts in particular display unexpected shifts from the first to the third person or vice versa. Rather than constituting a narrative technique, I argue that such shifts should be related to the existence of two major types of stylization, called the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ style. In objectively styled contracts, subjective intrusions may occur as a result of the scribe temporarily assuming himself to be the deictic center, whereas in subjectively styled contracts objective intrusions may occur as a result of the contracting parties dictating to the scribe, and the scribe not modifying the personal references. There are also a couple of texts which display more extensive deictic alter­nations, which suggests that generic confusion between the two major types of stylization may have played a role.

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