“Some do and some doesn’t”: Verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles

Among the chief characteristics of the northern dialects since Middle English times has been the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a systemic split in the verbal concord system which allows for invariant verbal -s forms everywhere except when the verb is directly accompanied by a simple personal pronoun. This study provides a geographical and comparative survey of the reflexes of this pattern in the northern dialects, drawing attention to their variability and to their interaction with other related and/or competing patterns of concord variation. A corpus investigation reveals that over and above the ‘hard’ constraints that define the Northern Subject Rule as such, there exist a number of ‘soft’ probabilistic constraints governing its effects which are also near-universally shared between the varieties in question. I then go on to discuss the likely paths of historical development that have given rise to this grammatical pattern, and critically review some attempts that have been made to account for it in terms of formal syntactic theories. I show that existing formal models fail to account for the range of variability of this pattern, both in a comparative, diatopic perspective and on the level of individual speakers. I finally argue that variation phenomena of this kind can theoretically be better accounted for in a usage-based model in the vein of current functionalist and emergentist theories.