The Northern Subject Rule in Ulster: How Scots, how English?

Abstract

In diffusionist accounts of the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), this subject-verb concord system spread from Scotland via Ulster to North America and elsewhere. Thus, the NSR in Mid-Ulster English dialects of districts originally settled from England is attributed to diffusion from Ulster-Scots. But the NSR was also a feature of dialects of the North and North Midlands, the regions that contributed most of the English settlers to the Ulster Plantation. Since English and Scottish settlement patterns established in the seventeenth century have been reflected in Ulster dialect boundaries since then, the founder principle provides an alternative account of the persistence of the NSR in Northern Irish English. Usage in nineteenth-century emigrant letters indicates that the NSR was as strong in English-influenced dialects of Mid-Ulster as in Ulster-Scots and suggests that the NSR in Ulster may be a direct import from England as well as Scotland. and Ireland. Areas settled mainly by Scots, Ulster-Scots from the North of Ireland (often Scotch-Irish in American usage), and English still differ in dialect lexicon and features of phonology, morphology, and syntax in ways that can be traced back to their regional roots across the Atlantic (see, e.g., Wolfram & Schilling-Estes, 1998:102-107). As shown in the map in Figure 1, the boundaries between the major varieties of Northern Irish English (NIE) reflect the linguistic influence of English and Scottish founder populations, in that relatively English (Mid-Ulster) and Scottish (Ulster-Scots) dialects are found in parts of the province settled in the seventeenth century from England and Scotland, respectively (Barry

T-to-R and the Northern Subject Rule: questionnaire-based spatial, social and structural linguistics

“…Hence, Cheshire et al (1989), Godfrey & Tagliamonte (1999), Henry (2002), Wright (2002) and McCafferty (2004) suggest that existential there favours -s. NPs conjoined with and (Montgomery et al 1993;Godfrey & Tagliamonte 1999;Beal & Corrigan 2000;McCafferty 2003) also favour -s marking as do those which occur in relative clause constructions (Montgomery et al 1993;Godfrey & Tagliamonte 1999). Hence, Cheshire et al (1989), Godfrey & Tagliamonte (1999), Henry (2002), Wright (2002) and McCafferty (2004) suggest that existential there favours -s. NPs conjoined with and (Montgomery et al 1993;Godfrey & Tagliamonte 1999;Beal & Corrigan 2000;McCafferty 2003) also favour -s marking as do those which occur in relative clause constructions (Montgomery et al 1993;Godfrey & Tagliamonte 1999).…”

“…(6) They ganØ and never speaks (SED: Du) Recent accounts of NSR have focused either on the interplay between the factors controlling the TSC and PSC in contemporary dialects beyond the Northern English geographical boundary with which it was first associated (like Wolfram & Christian 1976;Kallen 1991;Montgomery et al 1993;Henry 1995;Montgomery & Fuller 1996;Montgomery 1997;Filppula 1999;Godfrey & Tagliamonte 1999;Schendl 2000;Wright 2002;McCafferty 2003McCafferty , 2004Rupp 2006;Tortora & den Dikken 2010;Zanuttini & Bernstein 2011) or else on the extent to which NSR in all its aspects remains extant in Northern varieties (as in Beal & Corrigan 2000;Pietsch 2005;Cole 2008;Adger & Smith 2010). Our orientation here is towards the latter, so our account in section 4 examines the dynamics of the two major constraints just described in communities at some remove from one another across the linguistic north.…”

“…(a) Existentials -'There's rats in the garden' (b) Bare quantifiers -'Both needs water' (c) Subject relatives -'The people who wants them' (d) Of them constructions -'All of them likes it' (e) Simple declarative sentences -'My sister wants orange shoes' 22 (f) Occurrence of lexical be and have -'They was very sad' (g) Reduction of be/have -'I's few friends' As one might expect from the results of previous studies on other English vernaculars(Eisikovits 1991;McCafferty 2003;Wright 2002), existentials are most likely to Newcastle χ 2 (18): 104.809, Acceptability rates by Newcastle and Hawick informants for NSR in different types of syntactic construction…”

Irish English in emigrant letters

“…Letters have provided data for linguistic studies of IrE, beginning with Montgomery's () survey of possible Ulster influences on Appalachian dialects. There is by now a large body of studies based on linguistic data from letters, either partly (Filppula ; Hickey , ) or entirely (Montgomery , ; McCafferty , , ; Pietsch , ; McCafferty & Amador‐Moreno ). Linguists are more interested in the linguistic forms used by letter writers than in the letters’ contents.…”

Learning English in ASEAN: Myths and Principles

“…German habst). The fiendish "northern subject rule" still occurs in some vernaculars of British, Irish, and American English (McCafferty, 2003), where the following sentence follows the rule. "Cooks peels the potatoes and then they wash and boils them."…”