Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the verbal morphology of the Old English interlinear gloss to the Durham Collectar, attributed by almost universal consensus to Aldred of Chester-le-Street, whose earlier gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels has recently been the object of scholarly attention (Cole 2014;Fernández Cuesta & Pons-Sanz 2016,Gameson et al. 2017). This article analyses -s/-thvariation in the present indicative and imperative forms in relation to their syntactic context, in particular subject type and subject-verb adjacency, in order to assess whether the Northern Subject Rule detected byCole (2014)in Lindisfarne was also operative in Aldred’s later gloss. By means of a quantitative analysis, we find that the first constraint does not significantly affect -s/-ðvariation in the gloss and that there is insufficient context for the second. Additionally, it is argued that adjacency is a problematic variable in this text-type. We also demonstrate that there is a higher percentage of second person singular -stand -ðin the Collectar than in Lindisfarne and discuss the possible influence of standard West Saxon on the later gloss.

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