Dynamic typology and vernacular universals J.K.

Chambers
Abstract
Vernacular universals arise in the context of sociolinguistic dialectology as generalizations about intralinguistic variation, and their universal status is emerging from analyses of putative crosslinguistic counterparts. The external factors that underlie them have distinctive social and functional aspects. I exemplify them by examining one of them, default singulars, a specific type of copula nonconcord. In English, default singulars occur as invariant was (as in They was too sick to travel). Socially, default singulars appear to develop naturally in the absence of contact models, as dramatically illustrated by Schreiers work (2002) on Tristan da Cunha. Functionally, they appear to result from stripping away inflectional redundancies, especially when they involve complex look-up mechanisms. Vernacular universals, unlike UG-based generalizations, are identified partly in terms of their social patterning, in so far as there are regularities in the way they are socially embedded, and this added dimension may provide a concrete basis for coming to grips with them. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Introduction Vernacular universals Dynamic typology Default singulars Linguistic constraints Finding the baseline Contact and language change 8. Worldliness and speech 9. Primitive and learned features 10. Nonconcord as a natural tendency 11. Grammatical constraints 12. Variationist typology

1. Introduction At the dawn of the Chomskyan era, many people believed that progress in linguistics would come from the discovery of principles that allowed generalizations across language boundaries. Thus Roman Jakobson said, We all seem to agree that linguistics is passing from the bare study of variegated languages and language families, through systematic TYPOLOGICAL research and gradual INTEGRATION, to become a thoroughly universal science of language (Jakobson 1963: 275). That historical thrust

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was waylaid, however, by the rise of Chomskyan syntax into the mainstream in the 1960s, and by the parallel rise of sociolinguistics starting at the same time and reaching mainstream status soon after. Neither theoretical syntax nor sociolinguistic variation studies made explicit claims about possible tie-ins with language typology. Chomskys goals were implicitly typological, to the extent that they were oriented toward universal grammar. The typological void remains, for that school, an accidental gap. Sociolinguists, for their part, have been preoccupied with discovering the distribution of types and tokens in real communities, and only recently have begun to look beyond their own borders. As sociolinguistics becomes less restricted to local events, it becomes comparative and, as the comparative aspect gains weight, cross-linguistic generalizations not only become possible but inevitable. Those generalizations are typological, and, as I show below, have universal implications. 2. Vernacular universals Sociolinguists have amassed copious evidence in the past 35 years for a surprising conclusion: a small number of phonological and grammatical processes recur in vernaculars wherever they are spoken. This conclusion follows from the observation that, no matter where in the world the vernaculars are spoken Newfoundland, Harlem, Ocracoke, Ballymacarrett, Tyneside, Buckie, the Fens, the Falklands, inner-city Sydney these features inevitably occur. Their ubiquity has one of two possible explanations. Either the features were diffused there by the founders of the dialect, or they developed there independently as natural structural linguistic developments. As I have shown at greater length elsewhere (Chambers 2003: 266270), the diffusionist explanation is implausible because of geographic spread. It is also implausible linguistically, because these features occur not only in working-class and rural vernaculars but also in child language, pidgins, creoles and interlanguage varieties. Therefore, they appear to be natural outgrowths, so to speak, of the language faculty, that is, the species-specific bioprogram that allows (indeed, requires) normal human beings to become homo loquens. I have characterized these recurring natural processes as vernacular roots (Chambers 2003: 266270). The best candidates, based on their

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recurrence, are listed below with alternative names and a simple English example:

(ng) or alveolar substitution in final unstressed -ing, as in walkin, talkin and runnin. (CC) or morpheme-final consonant cluster simplification, as in pos office, hanful. final obstruent devoicing, as in hundret (for hundred), cubbert (for cupboard) conjugation regularization, or leveling of irregular verb forms, as in Yesterday John seen the eclipse and Mary heared the good news. default singulars, or subject-verb nonconcord, as in They was the last ones. multiple negation, or negative concord, as in He didnt see nothing. copula absence, or copula deletion, as in She smart or We going as soon as possible.

Linguistically, these processes include some phonological ones (the first three) and some grammatical ones (the other four). That raises the ultimate challenge of bringing them together in a unified theory, though that may be a premature concern until the framework is better understood. Elsewhere, I have discussed morpheme-final consonant cluster simplification, symbolized (CC), and conjugation regularization (Chambers 2003: 258 265), final obstruent devoicing (Chambers 2000), and multiple negation (Chambers 2001) in detail and explored some of their implications as vernacular roots. In this article, I will deal mainly with default singulars. 3. Dynamic typology I have listed the vernacular universals with their English names and illustrated them with English examples. This is misleading. In so far as these processes arise naturally in pidgins, child language, vernaculars, and elsewhere, they are primitive features, not learned. As such, they belong to the language faculty, the innate set of rules and representations that are the natural inheritance of every human being. They cannot be merely English. They must have counterparts in the other languages of the world that are demonstrably the outgrowths of the same rules and representations in the bioprogram.

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Here, then, is where sociolinguistics intersects with typology. Luckily, just as variation studies have evolved since Jakobsons time, so have typological studies. Vernacular universals provide a potential resource for typologists working within the dynamic framework characterized by Kortmann (1997: 13): typology does not stop at accounting for (limits of) variation across languages, but tries to give a unified account of intralinguistic variation, crosslinguistic variation, and variation over time as essentially the same external factors are held to underlie all three types of variation. Like Kortmann, my goal is to make some progress toward Crofts dynamic paradigm, in which the study of all types of linguistic variation cross-linguistic (typology), intralinguistic (sociolinguistics and language acquisition) and diachronic (historical linguistics) are unified (Croft 1990: 258259). Vernacular universals arise in the context of sociolinguistic dialectology as generalizations about intralinguistic variation (so far mainly from English dialects) but their universal status is emerging from analyses of putative crosslinguistic counterparts. The factors that underlie them have distinct cognitive and functional aspects. Socially, the vernacular universals appear to fall into well-defined patterns in the acrolect-basilect hierarchy, but functionally there appear to be several disparate principles at work (from motor economy to cognitive overload). Unifying the functional principles into a few empirically defensible cognitive strategies may be too much to ask of any branch of linguistics at this time, important though it is to try. Vernacular universals raise the same challenges for typological analysis as do UG-based generalizations. To establish a claim for universality, it is necessary to compare processes that occur in two or more languages. One challenge arises in finding (or developing) descriptions at comparable analytic depth in the two (or more) languages, and another arises from determining equivalence between crosslinguistic categories. Unlike grammar-based generalizations, however, vernacular universals are identified partly in terms of their social patterning, in so far as there are regularities in the way they are socially embedded, and this added dimension may provide a concrete basis for coming to grips with them. I can make many of these points concrete by looking in some detail at the process of default singulars.

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4. Default singulars The grammatical phenomenon I am calling default singulars is exemplified in this sentence from Feagins research in Anniston, Alabama (1979: 202): I seen three rats, but they was all too far off to shoot. Here, the subject of the second clause, they (= three rats), is plural, but the verb form was is singular. In traditional grammar terms, the verb fails to agree with the subject in number. Constructions like these are not acceptable in standard English dialects anywhere in the world except in highly restricted grammatical environments (discussed below). All standard dialects require number concord between subject and verb be. The nonconcord pattern in which was occurs with all subjects, though nonstandard, occurs globally in vernacular dialects in various parts of the world. Britain (2002: 17) identifies this as the first and most common of two broad dominant patterns of past be across varieties of English, defined as follows: Vernacular Pattern 1: WAS occurs variably for standard WERE throughout the paradigm, both affirmative and negative. Its global distribution is evident from the fact that it is reported in Sydney, Australia (Eisikovits 1991), Buckie, Scotland, Nova Scotia, Saman (all Tagliamonte and Smith 2000), all varieties of African-American English, and many other vernaculars. There is a second pattern identified by Britain (2002: 19) as follows: Vernacular Pattern 2: WAS occurs variably for standard WERE in affirmatives, and WERENT in negatives. Whereas in Pattern 1, the negated verb remains singular the boys was interested, but the girls wasnt in the second pattern the verb form changes when it is negated the boys was interested, but the girls werent. It also occurs with singular subjects when the verb is negated, as in Johnny werent interested at all. This pattern also has fairly wide distribution in English vernaculars, being reported in North Carolina varieties (Ocracoke, Lumbee, etc., in Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1994; Wolfram and Sellers

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1999), Reading (Cheshire 1989), and the Fens (Britain 2002); for a Britainwide survey, see Anderwald (2002). It remains to be seen whether its distribution is global. What I call default singular explicitly refers to Vernacular Pattern 1. That is, it is purposely intended to specify the co-occurrence of the unmarked verb form (the singular in standard dialects) with all subjects, regardless of number. There is ample evidence that it is the basic vernacular system, with was and wasnt in all persons and numbers. Clearly, Vernacular Pattern 2, with was in affirmative and werent in negative, adds a grammatical complication by, in effect, requiring the bound suppletive form were when the negative clitic occurs. It represents movement in the direction of a concord system, and in fact imports the standard plural concord form (were) to do so. It appears to be at least one step removed from the basilect. Wolfram and Sellers (1999) add evidence from diffusion to arrive at the same conclusion. They note that leveling to was [i.e., Vernacular Pattern 1] may occur as an independent innovation, but Vernacular Pattern 2 is learned in the sense that cases of leveling to were/nt in the United States appear to be traceable to influence from British-based donor dialects (1999: 109). Vernacular Pattern 1 is simpler, and, by definition, more basic. If my assumption is correct, then eventually we should find evidence in some vernacular dialects for Pattern 2 developing out of Pattern 1. As we will see below, Schreier (2002) provides evidence for Vernacular Pattern 1 coming into being spontaneously in an isolated speech community. This is further evidence for its basilectal status. 5. Linguistic constraints We now know that the nonstandard default singulars and the standard concord patterns are poles on a continuum. In between, there is a graded hierarchy in which concord occurs more frequently with certain types of subjects than others. Two of them are so well known as to have their own names (Britain 2002: 1920): The existential constraint (E below): WAS is most frequent after there.

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Northern Subject Rule (B below): WAS is more frequent after nonpronominal plural nouns (NPpl) than after pronouns. So robust is the existential constraint (E) that it even intrudes into standard dialects, allowing nonconcord variants such as Theres too many McDonalds in Helsinki alongside regular constructions like Therere too many. Nonconcord after expletive there is the only exception to invariant concord in standard dialects (and even such nonconcord variants are often inveighed against in usage guides, notwithstanding their frequency in conversation). The Northern Subject rule (B) is named for the English region where it appears to have become established as a rule-like process. According to the Northern Subject Rule, plural nouns (as opposed to pronouns) prohibit or at least inhibit concord in some dialects. In actual speech communities, other subject types are graded along with plural nouns (NPpl) and existentials (there) in terms of the frequency of default singulars that co-occur with them. The hierarchy was first established, in my experience, by Feagin (1979), in her study of Anniston, Alabama. She showed that the subject-types were graded from (A) to (E), where (A) is the most inhibiting context for default singulars and (E) is the most permissive, as in the following examples (slightly simplified from Feagins originals as in Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 134136): (A) they (B) NPpl (C) we (D) you (E) there They was all born in Georgia, mama and my daddy both. All the student teachers was comin out to Wellborn. We was in an ideal place for it. You was a majorette? There was about twenty-somethin boys and just four girls.

The hierarchy is implicational. If a dialect permits default singulars after we (C), then it permits them in the subject categories below it (D and E), but not necessarily vice-versa. While this hierarchy holds for Anniston, there is, as we shall see below, some variability in the hierarchy in different communities. As always, the most predictable constraints are found at the poles of the dialect continuum, the acrolect and basilect. Standard dialects (acrolects) permit default singulars variably in (E), but nowhere else (and there are no categories below it). The deepest basilect variety has default

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singulars in all contexts from (A) to (E), apparently invariably; in other words, basilects have no concord rules at all. I can say this with greater confidence than ever before because of recent studies of the English spoken on Tristan da Cunha by Daniel Schreier (2002), for reasons discussed in the sections below. 6. Finding the baseline Tristan da Cunha (TdC) can be called the sociolinguists Galapagos. It is a South Atlantic island, and perhaps the most isolated inhabited territory in the world. It was colonized in 18201840 by British army personnel, shipwrecked sailors and American whalers (Schreier 2002: 77). The arrival of women from St. Helena Island in 1827 (Schreier 2002: 92) led to the first generation of native Tristanians in the years immediately following. After 1869, when the Suez Canal was completed, Tristan da Cunha became increasingly isolated, because the canal diverted traffic that formerly went around the Cape and passed within hailing distance. In the half-century from 1850 to 1900, the island received only three new settlers a weaver from Yorkshire and two Italian sailors (Schreier 2002: 77). The worst was yet to come. Schreier (2002: 77) says, The sociocultural isolation of TdC peaked in the early twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1940, the Tristanians were pretty much on their own. There was no mail at all for one ten-year period, and no ships for three years (Schreier 2002: 93). Left to their own devices, the islanders developed strong networks and extremely dense and multiplex ties (Schreier 2002: 93). There was only one village, no formal education (until 1942), almost indistinguishable gender roles, and, Schreier says, no social ranks. In this closed, egalitarian society, the disparate dialects of the immigrants were leveled by their offspring into a more or less uniform or focused variety. It is predictable that New-World societies will go through an astounding linguistic homogenization in the first generation (Chambers 2003: 65). In TdC, with virtually no social barriers and everyone in close proximity every day, the homogenization may well have been nearly complete, with the Tristanians shucking off even subtle variants in favour of neighbourly norms. One of the more striking developments involved default singulars. Colonists dialects were known to have had variable concord marking, Schreier says (2002: 91): that is, both was and were could occur with

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plural subjects in the English of the immigrant population. However, the offspring of the immigrant generations, the native Tristanians, eliminated concord from the dialect and adopted invariant was regardless of subject number. That is, default singulars became the rule, categorically. It is important to recognize that, as Schreier (2002: 92) says, Categorical was regularization in early twentieth-century TdCE was innovative rather than retentive. In other words, default singulars developed as an invariant feature out of diverse source dialects in which it had been only one of the variants. Schreier develops the following scenario: Once homogeneity [of categorical was] emerged and was in place, it was sustained by external factors such as immobility, isolation, and close-knit social networks. the interplay of these factors leads to acceleration (or, in extremis, to the completion) of language-inherent changes and to the thriving of vernacular roots (2002: 93). Significantly, as Schreier makes clear in this quotation, he has discovered a community in which default singulars, one of the vernacular roots as described above, diffused throughout the community as a natural development. The social conditions were decidedly eccentric, with total absence of mobility, almost no contact with outside groups and no immigration for several generations. Because there was little formal education and limited literacy, there was not even a codified standard language to measure the vernacular against. TdC society seems to be rudimentary even compared to pidgin and creole societies, because in the latter there are iron-clad social ranks and occupational hierarchies, with the more-or-less standard speaking bosses at one end and the creole-speaking workers, often slaves historically, at the other. Before Schreier, sociolinguists perhaps never came upon a community in which the basilect developed in the complete absence of an acrolectal superstrate. The superimposition of an acrolect has well-known consequences. It means that many basilectal speakers will accommodate to some processes from the higher styles, resulting in the creole continuum. It also means that, by the time linguists come along with their tape recorders and notebooks, basilectal forms are liable to be mixed with intrusive variants by the process of decreolization. As far as I know, TdC in the period from 18501945 is the only society ever studied in which there was no stylistic continuum and no accommodation. The vernacular that developed there out of the original dialect mixing had a kind of free choice in the absence of varieties that carried social values of prestige, learning or power.

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7. Contact and language change The extreme isolation in which the native TdC vernacular developed could not last. Since 1950, improved transportation, first with speedier water travel and then with air transport, made the island more accessible to outsiders and gave the islanders access to the outside world. Education programs were instituted and British officials were posted there as teachers and governors, joining the adventurers and wayfarers who found their way to the island. The linguistic results are predictable. As Schreier (2002: 94) points out, variation began occurring after the recent emergence of the community from insularity. The interlopers used non-local forms, and literacy, which encodes standard grammar as its norm and prescribes it, became general in a couple of generations. Standard forms began seeping into local speech, not with the force of a knockout but variably, at first as minor affectations in the speech of a few Tristanians, and then more commonly, until they eventually went unnoticed. So default singulars were no longer invariable. For the generation born and raised after 1950, it was possible to say They were tired out and we were too, though in some sense everyone knew (and still knows) that the normal, unaffected way of saying it is They was tired out and we was too. Schreier (2002: 85, 88) compared the use of those Tristanians born and raised in the isolated period with younger ones. Figure 1 shows the difference. The traditional Tristanians almost never use the concord form, were, as expected; but the younger Tristanians sometimes do. (Schreier provides results for women only in the younger group, and they are, he notes, ahead of men in the same age group, as expected in this standardizing change.) The gradualness of the change is evident in the infrequency with which the concord form occurs in the speech of the younger people never more than half the time and usually much less. The highest frequency for standard concord occurs in sentences with you subjects (as in You were tired), at 50 percent. This violates the subject hierarchy discussed in section 4 above, which is expected to show descending frequencies from the left to the right on the X-axis, from they as the most frequent subject for concord to there as the least. Apart from the unruly behaviour of you, however, the hierarchy holds. With that lone exception, the introduction of subject-verb concord in TdC English is proceeding according to the subject hierarchy established in faraway places like Anniston and inner-city Sydney.

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100 90 80 70
% standard WERE

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60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Tristan da Cunha after 1950 (women only)

Tristan da Cunha 1850-1945 they NPpl we Grammatical subject you there

Figure 1. Percentage of standard were with grammatical subjects in Tristan da Cunha in isolated period (18501945) and after (based on Schreier 2002: Table 3, 85 and Table 5, 88; TdC after 1950 percentages are calculated by combining Schreiers Young and Middle groups in Table 5, p. 88).

8. Worldliness and speech Emergence from extreme isolation in Tristan da Cunha brought numerous changes, and some of them are linguistic. As in the case of default singulars, the local norm is giving way variably to norms imported from outside. The local norm remains, as we have seen, but it is now one possibility among others. In this respect, Tristan da Cunha is not unique in any way. There is a law-like relationship between what might be called worldliness and speech. Put simply, the more urban and mobile the social setting, the more standard the speech. Sociolinguistic research on default singulars by several linguists in widely separated communities over two or three decades provides the most striking empirical evidence for urbanity and mobility as promulgators of standard speech. Schreier (2002: Table 3, 85) tabulates several studies of nonconcord. By a happy accident, it turns out that the studies have taken place in settings distinguishable in terms of size, urbanization and

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movement. Sydney, Australia (Eisikovits 1991) and York, England (Tagliamonte 1998) are large cities in highly urbanized regions; Anniston, Alabama (Feagin 1979) is a mid-sized city at the hub of a rural region in the American south; the Fens (Britain 2002) are an agricultural region in the east Midlands of England; and Tristan da Cunha (Schreier 2002) is the closeted Atlantic island. The studies of default singulars in these places were undertaken independently, without reference to one another, and separated by vast geographical distances. They are comparable because of their shared methodologies, as quantitative variationist studies. The comparison as shown in Figure 2 makes a stunning demonstration of the dialect law of worldliness and speech. The communities show a wide range of variation, from nearly pure standard concord (100 percent) to its complete absence. The communities are stratified, and the stratification correlates robustly it is not hyperbolic to say brilliantly, even exquisitely with urban complexity, from York and Sydney at the standard extreme, through Anniston and the Fens in the mid region, to Tristan da Cunha at the bottom. Equally brilliant is the discovery that the grammatical subject hierarchy holds in all these disparate settings with only a few minor discrepancies.
100 90 80 70 % standard WERE 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 they NPpl we you Grammatical subject there Tristan da Cunha (1850-1945) Anniston c Fens c c c c c York Sydney

Figure 2. Percentage of standard were with grammatical subjects in five communities (based on data compiled by Schreier 2002: Table 3, 85)

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9. Primitive and learned features The intrusion of standard forms in default singulars in Tristan da Cunha (as in Figure 1) provides the best empirical evidence so far for the theory of Vernacular Roots. The core of the theory maintains that the standard dialect differs from other dialects by resisting certain natural tendencies in the grammar and phonology (Chambers 2003: 254). The basilectal form is PRIMITIVE, part of the innate bioprogram, and the standard is LEARNED, an experiential excrescence on the bioprogram. Finding the basilect in what might be called a pure state is rare, because human well-being entails outbreeding and social intercourse and also perhaps barter and territorial expansion, all of which break down barriers. Socialization beyond the tribe requires infrastructure, including ranks and protocols. It also, evidently, fosters linguistic norms, superimposed on primitive forms. Kroch (1978:18) was perhaps first to recognize that language standardization is ideological, with learned linguistic constraints originating as markers of status and rank. Figure 2, with its strata of linguistic complexity layered according to social complexity, provides a graphic demonstration. Finding the basilectal form in its unadulterated state is uncommon. Pidgins make the most likely sites, as Bickerton (1981) has argued, but by the time linguists arrive pidgins are creolized at the very least, and the purest basilectal form must be inferred from the creole continuum. Schreiers discovery on Tristan da Cunha represents a breakthrough because the default singulars in their pure basilectal form there are palpable. Moreover, he has shown that they came into being as a natural regression to primitive linguistic instincts, a conclusion that follows from an apparent-time inference of very shallow time depth and therefore seems virtually incontrovertible. 10. Nonconcord as a natural tendency The theory of vernacular roots rests squarely on the assumption that basilectal forms are in some demonstrable sense more natural than standard forms. Demonstrating naturalness seems relatively easy for phonological processes compared to grammatical ones (and perhaps for that reason Kroch 1978 considered only phonology). For example, consonant cluster simplification (CC) represents economies in articulatory (motor) gestures that are quantifiable (Chambers 2003: 258259). Principles that

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might underlie natural grammatical processes are never so concrete. In previous discussions, for conjugation regularization I have proposed an underlying principle of cognitive overload (Chambers 2003: 260, based on Pinker and Prince 1999, whereby idiosyncratic retrieval of strong forms carries higher cost than rule-governed or inferable generalizations), and for multiple negation an underlying principle of compositionality (Chambers 2001, based on Giannikidou 2000, whereby the morphosyntax carries more than one negative marker but the semantic interpretation is a single negative; by compositionality Giannikidou means that semantic interpretation should be determined by morphosyntax). For default singulars, a plausible principle suggests itself readily. Nonconcord is structure-independent. Looked at from the top down, so to speak, concord in standard dialects exacts a processing cost with no information gain. Specifying number (and in some languages person and gender) in the verb replicates information already explicit in the subject. Putting the inflectional markers in place requires identifying the subject, analyzing its properties, and encoding some of those properties as inflectional morphemes in the verb. It is structure-dependent in that it requires a look-back mechanism to match number in the verb with number in the subject. It gets more complicated when the subject is a dummy, like there, because it then requires a look-forward mechanism to find the number of the semantic subject that there represents (a point I return to below). The information encoded by concord markers in the verb is absolutely redundant. Avoiding absolute redundancy seems like a sound principle for any kind of processing device, including the language faculty. In that sense, it has a kind of intuitive credibility that is about the same as motor economy as an explanation for (CC). It is perhaps a bit disquieting, I admit, to realize that it adds yet another explanation for the naturalness of primitive processes, along with the aforementioned cognitive overload and compositionality. Offsetting that, I must say that these principles do not appear to be unrelated. It seems to me that notions like these might ultimately be seen as belonging to one or perhaps two more general principles of linguistic cognition. What those general principles might look like awaits a day when they are better understood, perhaps in some unforeseeable time when an enlightened psycholinguistics will make real headway on linguistic processing. It is important, it seems to me, to seek naturalness explanations if only to accumulate best-guesses that might eventually stimulate more concrete explorations into the workings of the language faculty.

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11. Grammatical constraints Turning to the grammatical constraints, the remarkably regular hierarchy of subject-types that promote or inhibit verb concord, we can see that hierarchy as a kind of evolutionary scale along which concord replaces basilectal nonconcord. Though the hierarchy is remarkably orderly across heterogeneous social and geographical boundaries, it will be evident that attempts to explain the hierarchy differ in kind from attempts to explain primitive processes because they require appeals not to general cognitive processes but to specific English grammatical features. Starting with expletive there, the subject form that promotes nonconcord all the way up to the acrolect, there itself is inherently numberless, and thus dictates nothing at all for agreement marking. Concord in there-sentences comes from the following subject NP, which requires a look-ahead processor, but other concords require looking back. On both counts inherent numberlessness of there, and the unique look-ahead processor to the logical subject there promotes nonconcord. Expletive subjects other than there, in dialects that have them, promote nonconcord in exactly the same way. Tristan da Cunha and many other dialects have expletive it, as in At that time it was no gas stoves (Schreier 2002: 84). Unlike there, expletive it is inherently singular, but like there, concord requires a lookahead processor. In theory, it should promote nonconcord more strongly than there, and it probably does. The second most resistant site for concord is after you subjects. In English, you is syncretically singular and plural, since the 15th century loss of singular thou. Its ambiguity may occasionally confound concord in the stream of speech. The other subjects, we, they and NPpl, have no semantic or grammatical feature that distinguishes among them, or at least none that is discernible so far. As such, their order in the hierarchy should be arbitrary, and one of the empirical consequences should be that they are ordered differently in different communities. In fact, they appear to be re-ordered (or dis-ordered) in Buckie Scots and Saman (Tagliamonte and Smith 2000). Another intimation of arbitrariness at the high end of the hierarchy is visible in Figure 2 above, where Sydney and Anniston show a slight preference for NPpl over they, contrary to the expected order. My main point in all this is to show that there is a fundamental difference between attempts at explaining the primitiveness of default singulars and attempts at explaining the subject hierarchy that promotes

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them. The latter is accidental, couched as it is in language-specific idiosyncrasies such as numberless there and syncretic you. Because the hierarchy hinges upon English-specific facts, it has little generality, and obviously no claim to universality. Other languages may (or may not) have hierarchies of subject forms that promote nonconcord, but it would be a great coincidence if their hierarchies were the same as in English, or even similar. They too, presumably, would be determined by facts about language-specific morphemes and syntax. Default singulars and the other root vernacular features, by contrast, cannot be language-specific. They must be universal. As primitive features of the language faculty, they cannot be English-specific. Default singulars presumably arise naturally in all languages just as they did in Tristan da Cunha, and get overlaid with learned features in the process of standardization as they did in Sydney and York. My discussion of these matters depends on English much more than I would like, but careful, detailed, broad-based studies of vernaculars exist for English and are virtually nonexistent for other languages. (Even non-English sociolinguists tend to work on English vernaculars rather than vernaculars closer to home, as Edgar Schneider, Heinrich Ramisch, Terttu Nevalainen, Jean-Marc Gachelin, Mieko Ogura, and many other distinguished scholars.) There may be a feudal residue behind this. I once asked a German professor how multiple negatives worked in his language, and when it became clear to him that I was asking him about the speech he might have heard from house painters and auto mechanics, he replied that he did not think such people would use such language in his presence, and certainly not to him. Mechanics and other workers sometimes do use such language with professors in North America and many other English-speaking regions.) Stuck with adequate analyses mainly from English, I take some solace in Chomskys precedent for using available resources with the aim of finding, as he put it (1968: 24), conditions that are not accidentally true of the existing human languages, but that are rather rooted in the human language capacity, and thus constitute what counts as linguistic experience. 12. Variationist typology The variationist typology that is implied by this programmatic outline obviously needs an international cadre of variationists if it is going to be

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developed. It must be cross-linguistic, as are all linguistic typologies, in the search for default singulars, multiple negatives, consonant cluster simplification, and the other vernacular roots as they occur in different languages. It must be comparative, as all typology is, in order to discern what the processes share in two or more languages that allows them to be equated as the same process. Ultimately, the analysis of vernacular processes resolves into the search for basilectal forms. That cannot be undertaken directly, except in extraordinary circumstances of the kind that Schreier unearthed in Tristan da Cunha. Most often, base forms will be obscured by the learned excrescences that accumulate in standardization. Understanding the constraints that govern the highly restricted variety known as the standard makes an instructive starting point, and vernacular gradations should peel them away in structural layers. Those layers might be hierarchical, as in English default singulars, and the hierarchy might be determined by language-specific properties, also as in English default singulars. If they are language-specific, they belong to what Chomsky calls the accidental conditions of human languages. The search for vernacular roots, by contrast, belongs to the essence of language. When we glimpse that essence, the core that underlies default singulars and other vernacular processes in all languages, it should be possible to inquire into the biology of the language faculty, its cognitive and physiological basis. I intend this program as a concrete method of proceeding, but at the same time I recognize it as one more attempt at realizing an age-old ideal in the study of language. Jakobson (1963: 264) again: We [want to] see emerging ever new, unforeseen, but henceforth perfectly discernible uniformities of universal scope, and we are happy to recognize that the languages of the world can actually be approached as manifold variations of one world-wide theme human language. Acknowledgements At the Methods XI symposium where this article originated, I benefited from astute comments by David Heap, Peter Trudgill and Aila Mielikainen. This written version has been greatly improved by the formal scrutiny of Melitta Cocan and the critical scrutiny of Lieselotte Anderwald, Lukas Pietsch and Bernd Kortmann.

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