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

On the post-finite misagreement phenomenon 137
According to our analysis of the London Chronicles data, we are now in a position
to provide a structural account of how the PFM phenomenon arose. It took the
form of an optional agreement with a singular expletive subject, overt or null, existing
as an option alongside the option of regular number agreement between the finite
verb and the subject left in the VP. Crucially, it was not available when the subject
preceded the verb, since this structure contained no expletive element. In keeping
with other sociolinguistic phenomena such as negative concord (Labov 1972), PFM
was not categorical but alternated with the ‘standard’ plural agreement pattern. 5
It is interesting to consider the PFM phenomenon in terms of how language
change arises as a modification of speakers’ internalised grammars under the pressure
of external shifts in their language experience (see e.g., Lightfoot 2006). The
data patterns testify to the acquisition of speaker grammars that freely allowed
PFM but not misagreement when subjects preceded the verb. This may have come
about when London speakers heard was for were, possibly as a result of the influx
of speakers of other varieties during the 15th century, but rather than simply
positing this as an across-the-board default morphological property, they gave a
structural analysis to the input they observed. This would be favoured if the primary
linguistic data to which they were exposed contained plenty of evidence for
such a structural analysis. Indeed, Nevalainen (2006), who used a large sample
of English correspondence beginning at around the right time for our purposes
(1420), notes that was for were was particularly frequent in the context of expletive
there sentences. Although it is highly unlikely that the passive clauses with initial
adverbials studied in this paper would have formed a significant proportion of the
primary linguistic data of language acquisition, expletive there-sentences, on the
other hand, are likely to have been relatively common, thus permitting a structural
cue to be established in which an expletive was marked for singular number.
When this vernacular trait is combined with the persistence of residual null
expletives, we get the result that we see in the chronicles data: verbs optionally
agree with expletives, and in this genre expletives may be null as well as overt,
hence the PFM phenomenon occurs with and without expletive there. The scenario
found in these texts is thus an intriguing combination of an archaism and an
innovation. The structural position of the passive subject is irrelevant to the form
of agreement, as we would expect if it is indeed the properties of the expletive preverbal
constituent that are at issue. Thus the passive subject standing in any of the
three post-finite configurations we identified (embraciated, late, and extraposed)
may agree or not agree with the verb. Since the PFM phenomenon is independent
5. We use this term somewhat anachronistically, meaning the form that was to become the
norm in the later standardisation process.