Variable Grammars: Verbal Agreement in Northern Dialects of English

One of the conspicuous characteristics of the northern dialects of Britain and Ireland is variation in verbal agreement, especially the use of plural verbal -s. Once a mark of a consistent, categorical grammatical system in the traditional dialects of the area, today verbal -s appears in highly complex, hybrid variation patterns in the modern vernaculars. This corpus-based study explores continuities and discontinuities between the dialects involved, and discusses the implications of such hybrid variable sytems for a usage-based theory of grammatical competence.