Subject-verb agreement and the rise of do -support in the period of anglicisation of Scots

Abstract

Scots subject-verb (S-V) agreement is historically distinct from that of (Standard) English, as Older Scots employed a version of the Northern Subject Rule (NSR). It has been suggested that the NSR is a similar last-resort operation to do-support (de Haas 2011), giving rise to the question of whether do-support entered grammar competition with the NSR when it emerged in Scots. Using the new Parsed Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (1540–1750), this study explores the presence of these S-V agreement strategies in 16th–18th century Scots, and investigates the possibility that NSR constraints influence the trajectory of Scots do-support. The findings indicate that the NSR declines as do-support emerges in the PCSC data, but apparently without interference from subject type constraints.