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

134 Richard Ingham & Kleanthes K. Grohmann
An attractive possibility would be to appeal to a structural account which
handles the asymmetry by postulating that PFM occurs when the subject is not
in its canonical structural position. Although such an analysis would be able to
handle the quasi-obligatoriness of agreement when the subject is in its canonical
pre-finite position, it runs into the problem that agreement is still possible when
the verb is post-finite, in particular in any of the three post-finite positions identified
above. It is therefore false to say that, once the subject is out of its canonical position,
agreement fails, perhaps defaulting to a singular form. Accordingly, we reject the
notion of a morphological account by which was is a default form.
The fundamental problem is to explain the variability of agreement, in any
post-finite position. Since the PFM phenomenon alternates with plural agreement
in texts apparently written by the same individual, we are not dealing with intrasocietal
variation by social class or region, it seems. We come back therefore to the
position that PFM is an apparent free variant within an idiolect, which may indeed
support the notion of an incoming vernacular feature (Nevalainen 2006), yet at
the same time it is syntactically conditioned. What is thus needed is a syntactic account
which comports with the vernacular status of the feature. Simply postulating
alternative lexical realisations of be [+ past, +3pl] as was or were will plainly make
the wrong predictions for the data we have here. To account for the alternative of
using was for were only if the subject is post-finite we require a more fine-grained
analysis of the structures and of grammatical properties of the elements that fill
them. In the next section we attempt to provide such an account.
4. Analysis
We pursue an approach whereby the configurations with was and with were have
slightly different formal analyses underpinning the ‘vernacular’ and ‘standard’ usages.
These analyses turn on differing properties of the expletive element (there).
We argue that the ‘vernacular’ option was to make the verb agree with a singular
feature on the expletive subject. In fact this is still the vernacular pattern in nonstandard
present-day English, which commonly has a singular verb form with plural
associate subjects. Consider (17) for illustration:
(17) % There’s three people outside.
We have found informally that even speakers who do not regularly use non-standard
forms find such utterances marginally acceptable (as indicated by the percentage
mark) – as opposed to the ungrammatical counterpart *Three people’s outside – and
believe they produce such examples themselves.
It was shown above that PFM is not plausibly an archaic residue of the agreement
reduction seen in Old English. However, there was one facet of the data