THIRD-PERSON SINGULAR PRESENT-TENSE-S, -TH, AND ZERO, 1575-1648

Abstract

�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 presentday 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