I goes to work: subject-verb agreement

Introduction:

The Northern Subject Rule, also known as the Northern Present Tense Rule or the Northern Personal Pronoun Rule, is a grammatical phenomenon observed in some English dialects, particularly in Northern Ireland, Scotland and the northern parts of England. It is a pattern that governs the use of the marker /-s/ on present tense verbs depending on the type and position of their subject.

Murray, J.A.H., (1873) The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland: Its Pronunciation, Grammar, and Historical Relations. London: Philological Society.

Two Parts of the Northern Subject Rule:

The rule NSR operates under two constraints: the proximity-to-subject constraint and the type-of-subject constraint. Under the former, present tense verbs have the /-s/ marker unless they are located directly next to a personal pronoun subject (I, you, we, they). In Standardized English only the third person pronouns (he, she ,it) take the /-s/ marker in the present tense.

For example:

  • I often goes to the store (Northern Subject Rule)
  • I often go to the store (Standardized English)

The proximity-to-subject constraint gives rise to the possibility of two similar constructions having different verbal markings:

  • Do they sing?
  • Does the birds sing?

In varieties of English that exhibit the proximity-to-subject constraint such as Geordie (Tyneside), Scouse (Liverpool), Belfast, Yorkshire, and African American English – a verb will often be left bare if it appears directly after a pronoun but inflecting it with /-s/ otherwise.

From AAVE:

  • He understands what I say.
  • They always tries to understand.

AAVE: A collection of AAVE by Black Speakers for NLP Data – Stanford PACS. (2023, August 14). Stanford PACS.

From Tyneside English:

  • You’d be surprised the cars that comes round here
  • There’s some goes away for holiday

Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE). 23 Jan 2022. http://research.ncl.ac.uk/necte/.

From New Zealand English:

  • I sing and dances

https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/Publications/nzej-backissues/2007-laurie-bauer.pdf

In the second type of NSR, type-of-subject-constraint, an /-s/ is added to the verb if the subject is not a personal pronoun.

  • The children likes to play in the back yard. 
  • They like to play in the back yard.

Other Verbs:

Though the NSR typically realises as the addition of /-s/ to a verb ending, it can also appear with inflected verbs, such as “to be”. A number of varieties of English employ the constraints of the NSR with was/were agreement.

From Nottingham English:

  • they were making the clay tile
  • they just sort of was like, “right, you need to know your algebra”

Childs, C., & Cole, B. (2023, September 29). Supralocal or localized? Was/were variation in British English dialects. York Research Database. https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/supralocal-or-localized-waswere-variation-in-british-english-dial

Though called the Northern Subject Rule, it is more complex than the name “rule” would imply. Its constraints, though easily expressed in one sentence, are further modified by other considerations, such as types of verbs. For many speakers the verb “to have” incurs the Northern Subject Rule for the meaning of “to own” or “to possess”, which then triggers it being used in sentenced where “to have” is a perfect verb, such as “they has gone to work”. Additionally, there is some evidence of phonological conditioning in the distribution of /-s/ marking: verbs that end with vowels and precede words that begin with vowels are more likely to be marked with/-s/. Furthermore, conversationally common verbs like “to say” are marked with /-s/, even for speakers who do not employ the Northern Subject Rule in many other situations.

  • They says “can you not swim?”
  • But as you says…
  • We often says

It is also worth pointing out another feature of subject-verb agreement that is at play here: the existential “there”. Sentences that express whether something exists or does not exist often display different subject-verb agreement rules than non-existential sentences, even in varieties of English that do not display the Northern Subject Rule. For example, in the novel An Abundance of Katherines the character Colin muses “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that there’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.” 

Pendennis, Volume II, pg 44: Thackerey, William (1910)

Conclusion:

There are a number of reasons by speakers of English might say “I goes”, all of which are products of systematic syntactic conditions. Examples of the Northern Subject Rule, and adjacent structures, are often viewed as mistakes or deemed uneducated, in frameworks that elevate standardized English as correct language. However, these examples are in fact legitimate structures of the English language, with their own rules and patterns of usage. The Northern Subject Rule is not a aberration or corruption of standardised English, but rather a natural consequence of the English language’s complex and dynamic evolution.

The Northern Subject Rule is an underappreciated feature of the English language that warrants further investigation and exposure. More research is needed to tease out the details of the distribution and scope of this rule in Englishes across the Anglosphere. Conventions like the Northern Subject Rule should be included in language lessons alongside standardized verb conjugations, not as a correction to be fixed, but as a valuable feature that can enrich students’ understanding of their own English grammar. By acknowledging and teaching this rule, language instructors can promote a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of English, celebrating the unique features of different regional varieties.

Standardized English is a planistratum- a layer of language that has been imposed on speech communities and serves to flatten and reduce variety. We do not need to adhere to standardized language as much as we do socially, and recognizing “non-standard” language forms is a way to overcome this. By celebrating forms like the Northern Subject Rule, we can move beyond stigmatizing certain dialects or accents as “incorrect” and instead acknowledge the richness and complexity of language used across different regions and communities.

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