The Northern Subject Rule in the Breadalbane Collection

Abstract

ABSTRACTOne of the most distinctive features of Scots and northern English is the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), which governs the selection of inflections in the present indicative depending on the type and the position of the subject. The present article focuses on the operation of the NSR in the Breadalbane Collection, a corpus of Scottish letters written in the second half of the sixteenth century in an area having Gaelic as its first language. The study reveals no influence of the anglicisation process in the Breadalbane Letters and a near-categorical operation of the Proximity to Subject Constraint, contrary to statements found in recent literature, where it is generally assumed to be much less robust than the Type of Subject Constraint. The study concludes that the NSR patterns differently in northern Middle English and Older Scots (both “Lowland” Scots and “Highland” Scots), and suggests that the core NSR area is Lowland Scotland, rather than northern England.