Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

On the post-finite misagreement phenomenon 127
that PFM was a vernacular trait just because it represented the natural unmonitored
performance of speakers, and that the impact of growing standardisation on the
written textual record had the effect of expunging PFM as writers paid more
attention to norms.
Finally, we might consider a formal syntactic account of the PFM phenomenon,
such that agreement fails in certain types of structure, as has been proposed,
among others, for Celtic (cf. Borsley 2006) and Arabic (Mohammad 1989). Furthermore,
it is known that agreement inflexions in Old English were often reduced
in inverted clauses (van Gelderen 1997), especially in the 2nd person, e.g.:
(5) For hwon ahenge þu mec? Exeter Book, Christ 1.1487
why hang you me
‘Why did you hang me?’
It could be that the pattern illustrated in (1)–(4) above is a late survival of the Old
English structure. If this line of investigation is followed, questions of subject type
and position will be relevant, as well as the presence or absence of expletive there,
and perhaps information structure characteristics of clauses.
The goal of this paper is thus to clarify the status of subject-verb misagreement
in Late Middle English, in terms of the level of analysis at which it should
be addressed: Should it be called a vernacular trait? Does it reflect a processing
phenomenon, or can we see it as structurally determined?
The article is laid out as follows. In Section 2 we present the results of our
analysis of the London Chronicle plural subject data. We then try a number of avenues
offering potential solutions to the problem in Section 3, going on to propose
what we think best accounts for the nature and timing of the PFM phenomenon
in Section 4. Section 5 briefly summarises our main points.
2. Data
2.1 Sources
Data were drawn from eight 15th-century London chronicles analyzed for full
nominal plural subjects in pre- or post-finite position in clauses with a finite form
of be (copula or auxiliary). Co-ordinate subjects were discarded, as these could
take singular verb forms in Old French or Latin (Legge & Holdsworth 1934), potential
sources of influence on educated speakers at this time. The London chronicles
seem to have been compiled in English between 1430 and 1480 (Flenley 1911).
One that was begun in the 1440s (Vitellius) was continued into the first few years
of the 16th century. Their authors were citizens of London of the merchant class,