"Them's the men that does their work best": The Northern subject rule revisited

This paper addresses a set of issues concerning the analysis and historical development of the so-called Northern subject rule (NSR), which characterises many northern varieties of English. Based on an investigation of NSR effects in the Northern Middle English York plays, we present a new account of the NSR that combines a DM analysis of the relevant agreement markers with the idea that inflectional heads lacking phi-features (“blank generation”, Roberts 2010) may acquire agreement features via the incorporation of adjacent subject pronouns. Based on this analysis, we suggest a new scenario for the historical development of the NSR, arguing that after the breakdown of the Old English agreement system, the NSR developed via dialect contact between northern and southern varieties. More precisely, we propose that syncopated verb forms (resulting from southern Agr-weakening) were integrated into the northern grammar as marked agreement formatives that contrasted with the generalized -s-ending.