Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2010 / Patterns of Verbal -s in the Varieties of English Today

Patterns of Verbal -s in the Varieties of English Today

Paper · 2010 · Christina Bismark

Summary

Standard English uses the verb ending -s only to mark a third person singular subject. Many non-standard varieties around the world also attach it to verbs whose subjects are not third person singular. Bismark asks which factors govern this non-standard -s, where each one occurs, and how often it is reported. She first lists 16 extra functions the ending can serve, such as marking habitual aspect or narrative style, or responding to subject type, word order, or sound environment. She then codes 145 published attestations from dialect studies as small records and counts them by constraint, region, resulting paradigm and verb type. Generalized -s with past tense be turns out to be the most widely reported pattern. Eight core constraints emerge, which she divides into two groups. Group I, the Northern Subject Rule family, applies where working out the subject's person and number is harder. Group II spreads one verb form across the whole paradigm and gives it a shared meaning. The study turns scattered case reports into a comparable map and gives a functional reason why some patterns persist.

Key points

  • The catalogue covers 16 non-standard functions of verbal -s, including Polarity, Aspect, Tense, Type of Subject Constraint (TSC), Position of Subject Constraint (PSC), Northern Subject Rule (NSR), Existential there Effect, Text Type, Sequence and Following Complement.
  • The dataset holds 145 literature attestations. Each is coded with five fields: reference, constraint, area, paradigm and verb type.
  • Generalized -s is the most attested pattern, with 65 sources:
    • 55 of them concern past tense be, which is reported worldwide;
    • 24 concern present tense full verbs, mainly Wales, south and southwest England and some Black US varieties;
    • 20 concern present tense be, mostly in the US South.
  • Polarity levelling (positive was versus negative weren't) has 15 reports, centred on England and the southern and southeastern US. Tense marking appears in only six sources.
  • The core set consists of Generalized -s, TSC, Existential there, Text Type, PSC, NSR, Aspect and Polarity:
    • Group I (NSR, TSC, PSC, there) is linked to processing complexity;
    • Group II is linked to simplifying the paradigm while broadening verb meaning.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Coding each published report as a fixed-field record and then counting by field turns a qualitative literature into a dataset that can be queried for frequency and spread.
  • I2. The paper explains verb mismatches by subject difficulty: a heavy subject, intervening material or inverted order makes agreement fail, while a plain pronoun next to the verb keeps it.
  • I3. Existential there splits the subject's role between the formal there and the notional noun phrase that follows, which explains why the verb often appears singular.
  • I4. In some varieties a non-agreeing -s carries meaning instead of being an error, for example habitual aspect or a narrative, historic-present style.
  • I5. The Table 1 paradigms show the attested shapes of -s marking: third person only, singular only, plural only, all forms, or one specific person.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Mova's evaluation could log every parser disagreement or repair rule as a similar typed record (phenomenon, source, construction, outcome), so we can rank which failure patterns are core and which are peripheral.
  • I2 (tree): The parsers should not rely on number agreement to attach a subject when the subject is coordinated, separated from the verb or inverted, and should treat a mismatch there as a weak signal.
  • I3 (frames): Role assignment should always take the post-verbal noun phrase as the participant in there is/was clauses and ignore the verb's number when counting entities.
  • I4 (world): When texts with dialect features show -s throughout the paradigm, the world builder could read the events as habitual or as a narrated past sequence rather than one-off present events.
  • I5 (tokens): The morphology module could accept these shapes as known variants, lemmatising forms like I drinks or they was cleanly and flagging them as non-standard rather than as errors.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Christina Bismark. 2010. Patterns of Verbal -s in the Varieties of English Today. Linguaculture 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.2478/v10318-012-0001-y

@inproceedings{bismark2010patterns,
  title = {{Patterns of Verbal -s in the Varieties of English Today}},
  author = {Christina Bismark},
  booktitle = {Linguaculture 1},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.2478/v10318-012-0001-y},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2478/v10318-012-0001-y}
}

References

97 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Aceto, Michael. 2004. Eastern Caribbean English-derived language varieties: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 437-53. find
  2. Anderwald, Liselotte. 2001. Was/Were-variation in non-standard British English today. English World-Wide 22:1-21. ↗
  3. Anderwald, Liselotte. 2004. The morphology and syntax of the varieties of English spoken in the Southeast of England. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 157-78. find
  4. Bailey, Guy, Natalie Maynor & Patricia Cukor-Avila. 1989. Variation in subject-verb concord in Early Modern English. Language Variation and Change 1:285-300. ↗
  5. Barth, Ernst. 1968. The Dialect of Naunton (Gloucestershire). Zürich: Verlag P.G. Keller. find
  6. Bauer, Laurie. 1994. English in New Zealand. In Burchfield (ed.), 382-429. ↗
  7. Beal, Joan. 1993. The grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English. In Milroy & Milroy (eds.), 187-213. find
  8. Brilioth, Börje. 1913. A grammar of the dialect of Lorton (Cumberland): historical and descriptive with an appendix on the Scandinavian element dialect specimens and glossary. London: Oxford University Press. find
  9. Britain, David. 2002. Diffusion, levelling, simplification and reallocation in past tense BE in the English Fens. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6:16-43. ↗
  10. Britain, David & Andrea Sudbury. 2002 There’s Sheep and There’s Penguins: Convergence, ‘Drift’ and ‘Slant’ in New Zealand and Falkland Island English. In Mari Jones & Edith Esch (eds.), Language change: the interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors, 211-40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ↗
  11. Burchfield, Robert (ed.). 1994. English in Britain and Overseas: origins and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  12. Cheshire, Jenny. 1978. Present tense verbs in Reading English. In Peter Trudgill (ed.), Sociolinguistic patterns in British English. 52-69. London: Arnold. find
  13. Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation in an English dialect: a sociolinguistic study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  14. Cheshire, Jenny, Viv Edwards & Pamela Whittle. 1993. Urban British dialect grammar: the question of dialect levelling. In Milroy & Milroy (eds.), 54-96. find
  15. Christian, Donna, Walt Wolfram, & Nanjo Dube. 1988. Variation and change in geographically isolated communities: Appalachian English and Ozark English. Tuscaloosa, AL: American Dialect Society. find
  16. Clarke, Sandra. 1997. English verbal -s revisited: The evidence from Newfoundland. American Speech 72:227-59. ↗
  17. Clarke, Sandra. 2004. Newfoundland English: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 303-18. find
  18. Connolly, John. 1990. Port Talbot English. In Coupland, 121-29. find
  19. Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  20. Coupland, Nikolas. 1988. Dialect in use: sociolinguistic variation in Cardiff English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. find
  21. Coupland, Nikolas. 1990. English in Wales: diversity, conflict and change. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. find
  22. Dieth, Eugen. 1932. A grammar of the Buchan dialect (Aberdeenshire), vol. 1: Phonology, accidence. Cambridge: Heffer. find
  23. Edwards, Viv & Bert Weltens. 1985. Research on non-standard dialects of British English: Progress and prospects. In Wolfgang Viereck (ed.), Focus on: England and Wales, 97-139. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ↗
  24. Eisikovits, Edina. 1991. Variation in subject-verb agreement in Inner Sydney English. In Jenny Cheshire (ed.), English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives, 235-56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  25. Fasold, Ralph. 1972. Tense marking in Black English: A linguistic and social analysis. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics. find
  26. Fasold, Ralph. 1998. The relation between black and white speech in the south. In Michael D. Linn (ed.), Handbook of Dialects and Language Variation, 475-500, San Diego: Academic Press. find
  27. Feagin, Crawford. 1979. Variation and Change in Alabama English: A sociolinguistic study of the White community. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. find
  28. Filppula, Markku. 1999. The Grammar of Irish English. Language in Hibernian style. London & New York: Routledge. find
  29. Filppula, Markku. 2000. The unbearable lightness of the ‘Layer Cake Model’: a variationist critique. In Hildegard L.C. Tristram (ed.), The Celtic Englishes II, 314-22. Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag. find
  30. Filppula, Markku. 2004. Irish English: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 73-101. find
  31. Godfrey, Elisabeth & Sali Tagliamonte. 1999. Another piece for the verbal -s story: Evidence from Devon in southwest England. Language Variation and Change 11:87-121. ↗
  32. Harris, John. 1993. The grammar of Irish English. In Milroy & Milroy (eds.), 139-16. find
  33. Hazen, Kirk. 2000a. Identity and ethnicity in the rural South: A sociolinguistic view through past and present be. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. find
  34. Hazen, Kirk. 2000b. Subject-verb concord in a postinsular dialect: The gradual persistence of dialect patterning. Journal of English Linguistics 28:127-44. ↗
  35. Hazen, Kirk. 2006. The final days of Appalachian Heritage Language. In Thomas E. Murray & Beth L. Simon (eds.), Language Variation and Change in the American Midland, 129-50. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. find
  36. Hay, Jennifer & Daniel Schreier. 2004. Reversing the trajectory of language change: subject-verb agreement with be in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 16/3:209-35. ↗
  37. Hedevind, Bertil. 1967. The dialect of Dentdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckerl AB. find
  38. Henry, Alison. 1995. Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect Variation and Parameter Setting. New York: Oxford University Press. find
  39. Henry, Alison. 1997. The syntax of Belfast English. In Jeffrey Kallen (ed.), Focus on Ireland, 89-108. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ↗
  40. Hickey, Raymond. 2007. Irish English: history and present-day forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  41. Hirst, Tom. 1906. A grammar of the dialect of Kendal (Westmoreland): descriptive and historical, with specimens and a glossary. Heidelberg: Winter. find
  42. Hughes, Arthur & Peter Trudgill. 1996. English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of British English. London: Arnold. find
  43. Kirk, John. 2003. Archipelagic Glotto-Politics: the Scotstacht. In Hildegard L.C. Tristram (ed.), The Celtic Englishes III, 339-56. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. find
  44. Kortmann, Bernd & Edgar Schneider (with Burridge, Kate, Rajend Mesthrie & Clive Upton) (eds.). 2004. A Handbook of Varieties of English: vol 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin & New York: Mouton. find
  45. Labov, William, Cohen, Paul, Clarence Robbins & John Lewis. 1968. A Study of the Non-standard English of Negro and Puerto-Rican Speakers in New York City, Report no. 3288. Philadelphia: US Regional Survey. find
  46. Lewis, Jack Windsor. 1990. Syntax and Lexis in Glamorgan English. In Coupland, 109-20. find
  47. Macafee, Caroline. 1992. Characteristics of non-standard grammar in Scotland. website: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~enl038/grammar.htm, accessed 5.4.2009, 11:56. ↗
  48. McCafferty, Kevin. 2003. The Northern Subject Rule in Ulster: How Scots, how English? Language Variation and Change 15:105-39. ↗
  49. McCafferty, Kevin. 2004. ‘[T]hunder storms is verry dangese in this countrey they come in less than a minnits notice...’: The Northern Subject Rule in Southern Irish English. English World Wide 25:51-79. ↗
  50. McCormick, Kay. 2004. Cape Flats English: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 993-1005. find
  51. Melchers, Gunnel. 1972 Studies in Yorkshire dialects: based on recordings of 13 dialect speakers in the West Riding. Stockholm: Stockholm University. find
  52. Melchers, Gunnel. 2004. English spoken in Orkney and Shetland: morphology, syntax and lexicon. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 34-46. find
  53. Millar, Robert McColl. 2007. Dialects of English: Northern and Insular Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. find
  54. Miller, Jim. 1993. The Grammar of Scottish English. In Milroy & Milroy (eds.), 99-138. find
  55. Miller, Jim. 2004. Scottish English: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 47-72. find
  56. Milroy, James & Lesley Milroy (eds.). 1993. Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects of the British Isles. London: Longman. find
  57. Montgomery, Michael. 1989. Exploring the roots of Appalachian English. English World Wide 10:227-278. ↗
  58. Montgomery, Michael. 1997. Making Transatlantic Connections between Varieties of English. The Case of Plural Verbal -s. Journal of English Linguistics 25:122-141. ↗
  59. Montgomery, Michael. 2004. Appalachian English: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 245-80. find
  60. Montgomery, Michael, Fuller Janet & Sharon DeMarse. 1993. ‘The black men has wives and sweet harts [and third person plural –s] jest like the white men’: Evidence for verbal –s from written documents on 19 th -century African American speech. Language Variation and Change 5:335-57. find
  61. Mugler, France & Jan Tent. 2004. Fiji English: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 770-88. find
  62. Murray, James A.H. 1873. The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland. Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations. London and Berlin: Asher. find
  63. Myhill, John & Wendell A. Harris. 1986. The use of verbal -s inflection in BEV. In Sankoff (ed.), 25-32. find
  64. Paddock, Harold. 1975. The Folk Grammar of Carbonear, Newfoundland. In Jack K. Chambers (ed.), Canadian English. Origin and Structures, 25-32. Toronto: Methuen. find
  65. Paddock, Harold. 1981. A dialect survey of Carbonear, Newfoundland. University of Alabama: University of Alabama Press. find
  66. Pawley, Andrew. 2004. Australian Vernacular characteristics. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 611-642. find
  67. Peitsara, Kirsti. 1988. On existential sentences in the dialect of Suffolk. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 89:72-99. find
  68. Petyt, Keith M. 1985. Dialect and Accent in Industrial West Yorkshire. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ↗
  69. Pietsch, Lukas. 2005. Variable grammars: verbal agreement in Northern dialects of English. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. ↗
  70. Pitts, Walter. 1986. Contrastive use of verbal -z in Slave Narratives. In Sankoff (ed.), 73-82. find
  71. Poplack, Shana & Sali Tagliamonte. 1989. There’s no tense like the present: verbal -s inflection in early Black English. Language Variation and Change 1:47-84. find
  72. Poplack, Shana & Sali Tagliamonte. 2004. Back to the present: verbal –s in the (African American) English diaspora. In Raymond Hickey, (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transplanted Dialects, 203-23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  73. Purves, David. 2002. A Scots Grammar: Scots Grammar and Usage. Edinburgh: Saltire Society. find
  74. Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 2000. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. find
  75. Reaser, Jeffrey & Benjamin Torbert. 2004. Bahamian English: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 391-406. find
  76. Robinson, Philip. 1997. Ulster-Scots: A Grammar of the Traditional Written and Spoken Language. Belfast. find
  77. Sabban, Annette. 1982. Gälisch-englischer Sprachkontakt: zur Variabilität des englischen im gälischsprachigen Gebiet Schottlands; eine empirische Studie. Heidelberg: Groos. find
  78. Sankoff, David. 1986. Diversity and diachrony. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ↗
  79. Schilling-Estes, Natalie & Walt Wolfram. 1994. Convergent Explanation and Alternative Regularization Patterns: Were/Weren’t Leveling in a Vernacular English Variety. Language Variation and Change 6:273-302. find
  80. Schneider, Edgar W. 1981. Morphologische und syntaktische Variablen im amerikanischen early black English. Frankfurt/M: Lang. English: some grammatical Schneider, Edgar W. 1983. The origin of verbal –s in Black English. American Speech 58:99-113. find
  81. Schreier, Daniel. 2002. Past be in Tristan da Cunha: The rise and fall of categoricality in language change. American Speech 77:70-99. find
  82. Shorrocks, G. 1998. A grammar of the dialect of the Bolton area. 2 vols. Bamberg: Lang. find
  83. Smith, Jennifer & Sali Tagliamonte. 1998. We was all thegither, I think we were all thegither: was regularization in Buckie English. World Englishes 17:105-126. find
  84. Sudbury, Andrea. 2001. Is Falkland English a Southern Hemisphere variety? English World-Wide 22:55-80. find
  85. Tagliamonte, Sali. 1998. Was/were variation across the generations: view from the city of York. Language Variation and Change 10:153-93. find
  86. Tagliamonte, Sali & Jennifer Smith. 1999. Analogical leveling in Samaná English: The case of was and were. Journal of English Linguistics 27:8-26. ↗
  87. Tagliamonte, Sali. & Jennifer Smith. 2000. Old Was, New Ecology: Viewing English through the Sociolinguistic Filter. In Shana Poplack (ed.), The English history of African American English, 141-71. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. find
  88. Thomas, Alan. 1994. English in Wales. In Burchfield (ed.), 94-147. ↗
  89. Wagner, Susanne. 2004. English dialects in the Southwest: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 154-74. find
  90. Williams, Jeffrey P. 2003. The establishment and perpetuation of Anglophone white enclave communities in the Eastern Caribbean. The case of Island Harbour, Anguilla. In Michael Aceto & Jeffrey P Williams (eds.), Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean, 95-119. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ↗
  91. Wilson, Sheila & Rajend Mesthrie. 2004. St. Helena English: morphology and syntax. In: Kortmann et al. (eds.), 1006-15. find
  92. Wolfram, Walt. 2004. Rural and ethnic varieties in the Southeast: morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 281-302. find
  93. Wolfram, Walt. & Clare Dannenberg. 1999. Dialect identity in a tri-ethnic context: The case of Lumbee American Indian English. English World-Wide 20:179-216. find
  94. Wolfram, Walt & Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. American English. Dialects and Variation. Oxford: Blackwell. find
  95. Wolfram, Walt, Kirk Hazen & Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. Dialect change and maintenance on the Outer Banks. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. find
  96. Wright, Joseph. 1892. A grammar of the dialect of Windhill, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. London: Paul, Trench, Trübner. find
  97. Wright, Joseph. 1905. The English dialect grammar: comprising the dialects of England, of the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and of those parts of Scotland, Ireland and Wales where English is habitually spoken. Oxford: Frowde. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bismark-2010-patterns-verbal-s-varieties-english/