The origin of the Northern Subject Rule: subject positions and verbal morphosyntax in older English

Abstract

This article presents new evidence for the early history of the Northern Subject Rule in the form of an exhaustive corpus study of plural present-tense indicative verb forms in Northern and Northern Midlands early Middle English, analysed in relation to their syntactic context, including subject type and subject–verb adjacency. We show that variation between -∅/e/n and -s endings was conditioned by both subject type and adjacency in a core area around Yorkshire, whereas in more peripheral areas, the adjacency condition was weaker and often absent. We present an analysis of these facts in relation to the presence of multiple subject positions in early English, which we show contra earlier literature to be relevant for Northern English as well, We view -∅/e/n endings as ‘true’ agreement, which in the relevant dialects is limited to contexts with pronominal subjects in a high subject position, Spec,AgrSP; other forms of agreement (-s or -th) represent default inflection occurring elsewhere. This analysis supports the hypothesis that the NSR arose when the extant morphological variation in Northern Old English was reanalysed as an effect of pre-existing multiple subject positions.