The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in fourteenth-fifteenth-century Scots

Abstract

The article focuses on the operation of the Northern Subject Rule in the first-person singular in early Scots. It establishes that the first-person singular was under the scope of the NSR in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, with a near-categorical operation of the Proximity-to-Subject Constraint. In addition, it reveals the strength of this constraint, which in recent literature has generally been assumed to be less robust than the Type-of-Subject Constraint. A comparison with Northern Middle English suggests that Scots was more advanced in the operation of the NSR.