Laura Rupp & David Britain have dedicated this volume to ‘four major non-standard uses of subject-verb agreement’ across present-day varieties of English: (i) the cover term gifting verbal -s, that is, occurrences of the suffix -s beyond the third singular; (ii) the absence of the suffix -s in the third singular of present tense verbs (verbal zero); (iii) non-standard distributions of the past tense forms was and were (past be); and (iv) the use of the canonically singular existential expression there's with plural NPs (verbal -s in existential there sentences). Intending to apply a ‘neutral term’ to these ‘distinct but related’ phenomena, the authors subsume them under the common header of verbal -s.
What follows is a survey impressive in scope and detail that makes for a state-of-the-art reference work on these four varieties of verbal -s. For their analytical and explanatory models Rupp & Britain harness a whole series of linguistic paradigms including generative syntax, variationist linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, functional grammar, and discourse pragmatics, and show how such distinct research perspectives can have the potential of informing and complementing each other, or in the authors’ words, how they ‘are telling one story about the occurrence of verbal -s’. There may be good reasons to be skeptical about the authors’ multidisciplinary approach—after all, the purpose of any linguistic theory lies in its consistent independent application—but I for one find it intellectually ambitious, thought-provoking, and refreshing in an era of increasing compartmentilization of linguistic thought and frequent dogmatically motivated self-serving polemics.
The results of their analyses encompass a wide range of grammatical, stylistical, and social functions of verbal -s documented across numerous English varieties. They show, for instance, that verbal -s (as in (i) above) has come through a process of regrammaticalisation to mark a subject's degree of accessibility (along the lines of accessibility theory), habitual verbal aspect, narrative style, and social identity, such as vernacular culture in reading or the culture of Newfoundland drag queens.
Despite their formal and functional differences, the authors ascribe a common underlying motivation to all uses of verbal -s documented in this volume: They are all said to be motivated by diagrammatic iconicity, that is, the establishment of a symbolic relationship between themselves as linguistic signs and certain added meanings in context. In other words, the mere occurrence of variation expressed in varieties of verbal -s iconically indicates specific grammatical, stylistic, and social functions.
Whether diagrammatic iconicity is really the underlying motivation for these phenomena or rather a very general observable outcome is a matter up for further discussion, for which this volume provides considerable incentive. The authors conclude by expressing their surprise as to how many manifestations of verbal -s turned out to be motivated by discourse-pragmatic factors which motivates them to appeal for investigations of discourse-pragmatic factors to become routine in any analysis of grammatical variability. This volume could serve as a precursor for future fruitful discussions predicated on this proposed integrative approach.
