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American Speech 76.3 (2001) 236-258



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Third-Person Singular Present-tense -S, -TH, and Zero, 1575-1648

Laura Wright
University of Cambridge

This paper illustrates the various types of singular zero markers that would have been present in the speech of the English-speaking founder generation in Virginia, especially as this topic has a resonance for present-day American vernacular speech studies. I take my illustrations from the manuscript Minutes of the Court of Governors of Bridewell and Bethlem, which contain transcriptions of the petitions and declarations made by persons brought before the court. The English-speaking colony of Jamestown, Virginia, was founded on 13 May 1607. Starting on 2 October 1607, the Bridewell Court began to sentence people to transportation from London to Virginia. It subsequently sentenced offenders to Bermuda (after its discovery by George Somers in 1609) from 1618, to St. Christophers (St. Kitts, first settled by English-speakers in 1623) from 1628, and to Barbados (first claimed by English-speakers in 1624 and settled in 1626) from 1632. Londoners continued to be officially transported to all these places into the 1640s. In the 1640s a new crime appears in the Minutes of the Court, that of kidnapping or "spiriting" children and adults to work, in conditions amounting to slavery, in the plantations. Thus in the first four decades of the seventeenth century there was both legal and illegal forced transportation of London English speakers overseas to populate Virginia and the eastern Caribbean. 1

The people sentenced by the Bridewell Court to transportation to Virginia and the islands were not guilty of serious crime. Most of the transportees were found guilty of vagrancy, having been picked up poor and destitute by the beadles, constables, and deputies on the City streets. The earliest transportees were children, and so far as I can trace the prisoners' entries in ships' logbooks at the port of London, most transportees were in their teens or twenties at the point of departure. Although there is some first-person narrative included in the Court Minute Books, there is no first-person narrative from a transportee. Nevertheless, such first-person narrative as there is from the transportees' coaccused allows us to get close to what spoken London English was like at the time, and the more formal [End Page 236] written variety found in the general report gives us much linguistic information. 2 Essentially I claim that if a feature is systematically present in the Court Minute Books and is also found to be present in a Southern U.S. variety, then, unless there is evidence to the contrary, Early Modern English is its source. I invoke here Mufwene's (1996, 84) founder generation principle, which states that the subsequent development of transplanted varieties is "predetermined to a large extent (but not exclusively!) by characteristics of the vernaculars spoken by the populations that founded the colonies in which they developed. European colonies often started with large proportions of indentured servants and other low-class employees of colonial companies." Thus, newcomers into the colonies after the founder generation would, as a default, have acquired the speech habits of the speakers already in situ, to the extent that they were able. In present-day Southern U.S. speech communities, there seem to be differing amounts of third-person singular zero marking on verbs, with African American speakers having higher ratios of zero marking than Americans of European descent, and zero now being indexical of vernacularity or rurality (see, e.g., Sommer 1986, 197-98; Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila 1989, 295; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998, 156, 176, 305). In some communities, this can be quite a sharp differential: "-s third person singular absence (e.g., she walk) is found in both African American and Anglo American vernaculars but occurs at substantially different percentage rates in each variety. Some African American speakers show levels of absence between 80 and 95 percent while comparable Anglo American speakers show a range of 5 to 15 percent" (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998, 172). In what follows, I demonstrate...

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