Reconsidering nominative case in English

Abstract

Abstract The eighteenth century Hiberno-English folk ballad Arthur McBride, which sits at the intersection of synchronic and diachronic concerns, presents a rich selection of non-standard grammatical features found both in current Hiberno-English and Northern British varieties, as well as in Late Middle English/Early Modern English texts. Chief among these is NOM-INF, that is, nominative case-marked subjects of nonfinite clauses. Here it is argued that the emergence—and subsequent disappearance—of this construction in standard varieties of English is parametrically linked to other diachronic developments, including the loss of dative case, obligatory verb-raising, and quotative inversion with pronominal subjects. The analysis synthesizes recent proposals about Irish clausal syntax (McCloskey 2017, 2021) with an alternative view of phrase-structure and case licensing more generally—the ‘inverted specifiers hypothesis’. The resulting framework is claimed to provide a more satisfactory explanation for adjacency constraints than was previously available.