Verbal -s in Liberian Settler English: When the Northern Subject Rule goes south, really south

Monday, 28 March 2011, Colloquium

John Singler, New York University.

Abstract

The meaning and distribution of verbal -s has been a source of protracted debate in the literature on African American English (AAE), on AAE’s congener varieties, and on nonstandard varieties of English more generally in the US and the UK. Of particular interest for AAE and white vernaculars in the American South is the Northern Subject Rule (with the “northern” of the rule’s name referring to British Northern Vernacular), by which

  • verbal -s occurs on every present-tense verb with every subject except I, you, we, and they; and

  • it occurs with one of the pronouns mentioned above if the pronoun is not immediately adjacent to the verb (Wright 1905, Murray 1873).

I examine verbal -s in Liberian Settler English (LSE), specifically that of Sinoe County. More than 16,000 African Americans immigrated to Liberia in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. While a majority of all antebellum immigrants to Liberia had been slaves freed on condition that they go to Liberia, the percentage of such persons was higher in Sinoe than elsewhere. Moreover, the number who had come from large plantations was higher in Sinoe than elsewhere, and the number coming from the Lower South was significantly higher. Moreover, from their founding to the present, the Sinoe settlements have been far more isolated that those elsewhere and both government and missionary resources for education have been far more limited. LSE as a whole is clearly descended from nineteenth-century AAE. At the same time, a consequence of the demographic differences (and certain other factors) between the LSE of Sinoe and that spoken elsewhere is that, when compared to LSE more generally, the LSE of Sinoe shows up as being further removed from standard English.

One part of this difference is phonological: *CODA is highly ranked in the LSE of Sinoe. For those English suffixes that generally consist of a coda consonant, this has obvious implications, especially if the addition of a suffix creates a coda cluster. However, in this regard, the three -s’s of English pattern differently, as an examination of the speech of fifteen elderly Settlers reveals. All three -s suffixes are sensitive to speakers’ social attributes. Thus, among the elderly Settlers, only teachers use possessive ’s, and even they use it less than a quarter of the time. On the other hand, all speakers use plural -s, though its presence is much less frequent if the output entails a branching coda. When the root ends in a sibilant, the plural suffix is present most of the time (sometimes as the full suffix, sometimes simply as a suffixal vowel, e.g. [rosεz]/ [rosε] ‘roses’). Irregular plurals are always marked.

In the case of verbal -s, the suffix is far less salient, and distribution is far more limited. The suffix shows up, but not often. Its distribution is sensitive to social setting, but the phonological character of the end of the root doesn’t seem to be significant. In my talk I consider the Northern Subject Rule and also the semantics of verbal -s in the LSE of Sinoe and look at who uses -s and when. Ultimately, I consider what—if anything—the facts about the distribution of verbal -s in the presentday LSE of Sinoe can tell us about the history of African American English.