Third-person singular zero in the Norfolk dialect A re-assessment
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Chris Joby
Abstract
I use the results of my own research into the language use of the immigrant (or ‘Stranger’) communities in early modern Norwich to evaluate Peter Trudgill’s thesis that it was language contact in Norwich between the Strangers and the local English inhabitants that led to the emergence of third-person singular present tense zero (he go rather than he goes). I present evidence that third-person singular zero was already in use in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk by the time when Dutch- and French-speaking immigrants arrived in Norwich. The question then arises as to whether language contact did in fact play any role in establishing zero-marking as the norm in the Norfolk dialect, a process which was complete by about 1700. I argue is that if language contact did play a role in the success of zeromarking, it would have been in a manner different to that described by Trudgill.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Graphophonology and anachronic phonology Notes on episodes in the history of pseudo-phonology
- The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change
- On saying two things at once The historical semantics and pragmatics of Old English emotion words
- Third-person singular zero in the Norfolk dialect A re-assessment
- Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns
- On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative
- Out of the spatial domain ‘Out’-intensifiers in the history of English
- On the syntax and semantics of the past perfect participle and gerundive in early New Indo Arian Evidence from Eastern Pahari
- The correlation between motion event encoding and path verb lexicon size in the Indo-European language family
- Book Reviews
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Graphophonology and anachronic phonology Notes on episodes in the history of pseudo-phonology
- The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change
- On saying two things at once The historical semantics and pragmatics of Old English emotion words
- Third-person singular zero in the Norfolk dialect A re-assessment
- Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns
- On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative
- Out of the spatial domain ‘Out’-intensifiers in the history of English
- On the syntax and semantics of the past perfect participle and gerundive in early New Indo Arian Evidence from Eastern Pahari
- The correlation between motion event encoding and path verb lexicon size in the Indo-European language family
- Book Reviews
