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

128 Richard Ingham & Kleanthes K. Grohmann
mayors, aldermen, etc. The texts may thus be expected to reflect the language styles
of prosperous and educated speakers, who were not usually language professionals
in the sense that clerical scribes of lawyers would have been.
The period covered by the content of these chronicles typically goes far back into
English history, along the lines of the Brut chronicle (Brie 1906), and their entries
for years prior to about 1430 were presumably adapted from pre-existing materials,
possibly originally written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. Some residual use of the -en
plural inflection is observed in the chronicles, especially in the entries prior to 1450,
but not sufficiently regularly to be considered a valid measure of agreement with the
subject. We therefore looked for verbal forms where singular versus plural agreement
contrasts continued to be robustly observed into the Early Modern period, that is,
with be and have. In practice, post-verbal subjects with have were not found in this
corpus but be, especially as a passive auxiliary, was very well represented throughout.
This no doubt reflected the discourse preferences of the chroniclers, who were much
taken up with public events in which participants underwent experiences, often unpleasant
ones such as hanging, beheading and the like – this was after all the time of
the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor monarchy. Thus most of the data featuring
post-finite subjects were found to consist of passive clauses, often with an initial
adverbial stating the date or location of the event. The highly frequent use of clauses
with topicalised adverbials and passive inversion, though discoursally not typical of
English usage as a whole, offered an excellent field in which to explore the nature of
the post-finite misagreement phenomenon.
2.2 Results
Table 1 summarises the frequency of singular and plural forms of copula be with
plural subjects in the 15th century chronicles investigated. As can be seen, cases
of post-finite misagreement were found to represent nearly 31% of plural subject
clauses in the London chronicles (N = 55), whereas pre-finite subject misagreement
(N = 2) was below 1%. 2
The other point to note here is that PFM sharply increases in frequency during
the 15th century. Up to 1450, it is rather uncommon; but then, in the later 15th
century, PFM actually becomes more common than post-finite agreement.
2. The key for the abbreviated chronicle names used in Table 1 (and the examples throughout
the text) can be found in the list of primary sources (before the References); for cited examples,
the date of the entry follows the source in parentheses (where not specified, the chronicle
entry date is given within single quotes). ‘VFin’ in Table 1 refers to ‘finite verb’ (distinguished as
‘singular’ or ‘plural’).