Abstract
This chapter takes a historical sociolinguistic perspective on supralocalisation processes in the development of written Standard English by focusing on urban literacies in selected regional centres during the period 1560–1760. More precisely, a case study based on An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions (Kytö et al., Testifying to language and life in Early Modern England. Including a CD-ROM containing an electronic text edition of depositions 1560–1760 (ETED). John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011) traces the development of the present indicative third-person singular variable in depositions from the cities of Durham and Lancaster (north), Norwich (East Anglia) and London (south). This allows us to shed light on the occurrence and development of the –s variant (and its competitors) in written English over a period of 200 years.
This chapter has been written in the context of the research project Emerging Standards: Urbanisation and the Development of Standard English (c. 1400–1700).
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Notes
- 1.
Letters of denisation, which were issued by the Crown from the late fourteenth century onwards, would give the recipients the opportunity to ‘pay a fee and take an oath of allegiance to the Crown and in return were to be treated and considered in the same way as any English subject born within the realm’ (see website of the project England’s Immigrants 1330–1550).
- 2.
A recent and extremely valuable source that allows us to determine migration patterns and, therefore, potential language contact scenarios during the period 1330–1550 is the project database England’s Immigrants 1330–1550 that allows for full searches and is freely available: https://www.englandsimmigrants.com/
- 3.
For a discussion of London’s eminent role, as perceived by the sixteenth-century writer and literary critic George Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), see Auer et al. (2016).
- 4.
I have not used any linguistic tests on the data as the raw frequencies are rather low. In any case, it is still possible to observe when a shift from one variant to another takes place. This, in turn, allows us to interpret the processes that will most likely have taken place.
- 5.
The zero form as variant of the present indicative third-person singular suffix and its relationship to the subjunctive mood and the Northern Subject Rule shall be discussed elsewhere.
- 6.
While it may be tempting to link the zero forms to the third-person singular zero that can be found in the Norfolk dialect , a more thorough investigation of all zero forms as well as an exclusion of inflectional subjunctive forms and the Northern Subject Rule would be required.
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Auer, A. (2018). Urban Literacies and Processes of Supralocalisation: A Historical Sociolinguistic Perspective. In: Braber, N., Jansen, S. (eds) Sociolinguistics in England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56288-3_2
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