ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an alternative account of NonSt verbal s. It presents a brief historical overview of non-3sg verbal s, with a focus on regional Southern British English (SBE) and its transatlantic descendants. It explains pervasiveness of the STC in conservative SBE by analyzing subject-related constraints in Newfoundland English (NE), which, unlike many Diaspora SBE varieties, did not undergo post-migration contact with NSR-conforming dialect types. To investigate verbal s in vernacular NE, The chapter examines a data referred to as the Earlier NE corpus (ENEC), to distinguish it from the LNEC or corpus reported on in Clarke. By virtue of their lack of a plural-marked preverbal subject NP, the three syntactic structures existential constructions, in which the preverbal slot is occupied by the featureless placeholder there. Two of these relatives, inversion coincide with Putsch's prototypical s-favoring constructions; the others will be treated in this chapter.
