O. A. Stroganova. Northern Subject Rule in Scots (pp. 850–862)

Author

O. A. Stroganova (Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences)

Keywords\n Northern Subject Rule, grammatical scotticism, syntactic context, pre- standard, national identity

Pages\n 850–862

Summary\n

Northern Subject Rule is typical not only of Scots but also of northern English dialects, nevertheless in these two idioms it has different status: in northern English this grammatical feature nonexistent in Standard English, is usually regarded as a grammatical dialecticism. In Scots this feature represented by several variants is present both in spoken language and in the language of Older Scots and Modern Scots literature.In Scots the functioning of Northern Subject Rule is rather systematic. The usage of this grammatical feature depends on the position of predicatewith respect to subject and on whether the subject is a noun or a pronoun. The analyzed Older and Modern Scots texts show the stability of usage ofthe feature in the language of literature. Moreover, the most typical syntactic positions, in which this feature occurs, are approximately the samefor both periods, except for the cases in which the subject is expressed by the personal pronoun 2nd person sg. thow. In Older Scots these cases prevail over the others, but in Modern Scots they are very scarce, perhaps due to the influence of the simplified English verbal paradigm. Nevertheless the usage of this feature varies greatly from author to author. The frequency of usageshows that in Older Scots most examples appear in the sixteenth century poetry of the Scottish Chaucerians, whose work is traditionally associated with the rise of the Lowland Scotland’s literary tradition and Scots language. As regards the modern period, it is the twentieth century texts that feature most examples of NSR. These facts seem to confirm a correlation between the language change and the sociocultural context of the epoch. In the sixteenth century the formation of the Scots pre-standard was in progress, codification of Northern Subject Rule as a regular feature of the Scots grammar being a part of it. In the twentieth century the increase of the usages in question may have resulted from the rise of the national and language identity which took place during this period as well as from the attempts to create a new literary standard for Scots.

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