The *amn'tgap: The view from West Yorkshire

Abstract

The absence ofI amn'tfor the first person singular present tense negative form is taken to indicate that there is a gap in the paradigm. Recent accounts take a morphosyntactic approach and phonology is largely ignored. Such accounts typically focus on contemporary forms of Standard English. This paper, in contrast, compares nineteenth-century and contemporary West Yorkshire (WY) aux+n'tforms and pursues a largely phonological solution. The paper sets out to demonstrate that WY has never had a *amn'tgap and that changes over the past century shed light on the *amn'tgap problem. Contemporary WY is known to exhibit a phenomenon called secondary contraction, wherebyshouldn't[ʃʊdʔ], for example, may be pronounced [ʃunʔ]. I argue that secondary contraction is responsible for the creation of homophones foramn'tandaren't: [aːnt]/[aːt]. I will consider the possibility that certain aux+n'tforms have become lexicalised and that this has triggered secondary contraction as a phonological repair strategy. With the analysis of WY data as a backdrop, the paper then pursues the possibility that lexicalisation may have occurred, at a much earlier date, in precursors of Standard British English (SBE). Indeed, it seems plausible that homophony foramn'tandaren'tmay have led to prescription against new realisations ofamn't. The paper will show that grammaticallyamn'thas evolved in exactly the same way as other auxn'tforms, and it is only commentators who have treated it differently. If this is so, the *amn'tgap in SBE is man-made rather than grammatical in nature.