Talk: The Northern Subject Rule in low-class Pre-Modern Scotland

On existential

This presentation investigates the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) in 18th and early 19th-century Scotland by analyzing ego-documents (Dekker, 2002) from the lower social strata. Drawing on the Scottish Pauper Petition Letters (ScotPP, n.d) corpus, a pioneering corpus developed at Leiden University that focuses – for the first time – on private correspondence originating from the lowest social classes of early modern Scotland, the study highlights the inflectional behavior of the verb to be and related existentials in non-standard contexts. The goal is to assess the presence of NSR among low-class Scots and to evaluate the relative strength of its two key constraints.The results suggest that the proximity constraint is more robust than previously assumed, especially in less literate writers’ texts, supporting Montgomery’s (1994) and Rodríguez Ledesma’s (2013) findings. The study also reflects how class and literacy influence grammatical variation, as lower-class writers display more frequent NSR usage. Furthermore, this research provides novel insights into syntactic variation in underexplored sociolinguistic contexts. It emphasizes the value of ego-documents in historical linguistics, calling on more researchers to utilize the newly developed database and opens avenues for further investigation of the NSR in the Scotland.

Dekker, R. (2002). Egodocuments and history: autobiographical writing in its social context since the Middle Ages. Verloren.
Montgomery, M. (1994). The evolution of verb concord in Scots. In A. Fenton & D. McDonald (Eds.), Proceedings of the third international conference on the languages of Scotland (pp. 81-95). Canongate Academic and The Linguistic Survey of Scotland, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh.
Rodríguez Ledesma, M. N. (2013). The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in fourteenth-fifteenth century Scots. Folia Linguistica Historica 34: 149-172.

ScotPP = Scottish Pauper Petitions Corpus. Leiden Center for Linguistics. Compiled by Moragh Gordon, Jelena Prokic, Hester Groot, and Alma Strakova [in preparation].

This will be an online event.

Info

Day: 2025-05-15
Start time: 14:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: GWZ 4.116
Track: Historical Linguistics
Language: en

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