Introduction

This paper aims at reconstructing part of East Anglian English in its social context in the Early Modern period. Contrasting Norfolk and Suffolk with other regional varieties of Early Modern English, we focus on the marking of the third-person singular present indicative in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries, more specifically on the variation between the two suffixes -s and -th. The rise and extent of the zero inflection in East Anglian English are raised as factors which may have had a significant influence on the history of the suffixed form.

The spread of the originally northern form -s is investigated in three regional varieties: East Anglian, Northern, and London. Our primary material is drawn from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), which contains a large body of writers with different social backgrounds from throughout the country. At the sampling stage,however, particular attention was paid to the coverage of East Anglia, London and the counties north of Lincolnshire (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1996a).

The systematic evidence provided by the CEEC indicates that the ending -s was attested in the north throughout the period and generalized in London in the latter half of the sixteenth century. It was adopted much more slowly in East Anglia. We shall discuss various ways of accounting for this pattern of real-time variation. One is to relate it to a competing zero form, which would have provided a typologically less marked alternative in the third-person singular indicative. As the zero-form prevails in East Anglian English today, it must be traceable to an earlier period in the history of the variety. An issue that we shall therefore test is whether the time-lag in the appearance of -s in East Anglia might have been connected with the zero. A factor that may have promoted the use of the zero is the intensification of contacts with speakers of Dutch and French in East Anglia in the sixteenth century (Trudgill 1996).

In the Early Modern English period it is also possible to approach the diffusion of -s in terms of the relative speed of processes of supralocalization and incipient standardization in various parts of the country.