The Old English origins of the Northern Subject Rule

It has generally been assumed that the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), a grammatical constraint which conditioned present verbal morphology in northern Middle English according to the type and position of the subject, did not exist in Old Northumbrian (Pietsch 2005; de Haas 2008). Using data from the tenth-century Northumbrian gloss to the Latin Gospelbook the Lindisfarne Gospels, this paper aims to show that the distribution of present verbal morphology in Lindisfarne indicates that the syntactic configuration at the crux of the NSR was already a feature of Old Northumbrian. The OE dating for the NSR suggested by these findings may consequentially strengthen the argument for a Brittonic derivation of the NSR (Klemola 2000; Vennemann 2001; de Haas 2008; Benskin 2011).