Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Clare-ification
Christopher Langmuir clears up my confusion about verbs in John Clare's poem Emmonsails Heath in Winter:
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Regarding John Clare's seemingly wayward verbal morphology, it is perhaps pertinent to point out that one of the most salient features of his dialect, East Anglian, is a zero marking for the 3rd person singular, which I imagine he uses as often as it suits him [see Fisiak, Jacek, and Peter Trudgill, ed. (2001) East Anglian English. D. S. Brewer, xii+264pp, hardback ISBN 0-85991].I wish I could claim credit for the blog post title, but that too is Christopher's, from the subject line of his email.
