One of the rules in Standard English is that the regular main verb in a sentence must agree in person and number with the personal or demonstrative pronoun with which it is paired.
To indicate this agreement, the morpheme -s is added to the third-person singular form of the main, regular, present-tense verb. Seidlhofer (2001b: 149) states that this morpheme is often viewed as “the most typically English” feature.
Breiteneder (2005) analysed instances of the third-person -s that she came across in an ELF corpus. She analysed where these –s forms occurred and did not occur, and investigated to what extent these uses, whether or not they were “correct” by Standard English norms, formed part of the natural language use of ELF speakers. She analysed four separate, naturally-occurring ELF interactions in Copenhagen and Vienna between representatives of the European Union and national agencies of higher education.
The discussions comprised 47 different participants with 21 European languages and varieties as their L1s. Fourteen of these 47 participants made use of ELF. These participants were all fluent and competent in ELF because they had learnt English in formal educational settings over a number of years (therefore viewing Standard English as the norm). In addition, they use ELF because it is a communal language in this multilingual, professional setting. Breiteneder finds that these interactions were mainly transactional11 in nature, due in part to the highly specialised topics that were discussed. These recordings were transcribed for analysis of the occurrences or non-occurrences of the third person –s of main verbs in ELF.
In her analysis, Breiteneder found that although use of the third person –s is erratic, no single speaker in her corpus was completely ignorant about the rule underlying third-person distinction. In their various turns, all 14 of the ELF speakers at times used the third-person
–s but also had instances in which they omitted it, though in most cases it was used
according to the Standard English rule. The author also found what she calls “„superfluous‟-s marking” in the ELF usage of 10 of the participants. This is when the third-person –s is added to verb forms that do not require it. By Standard English norms, such use would be ungrammatical. This kind of additional and unnecessary marking i.e.
11 The author refers to Brown and Yule‟s (1983) definition which states that the transactional function of
communication is driven by the goal of getting the information across and therefore the speaker focuses on the content of his/her message rather than the grammar.
overgeneralisation or erratic omission of the third-person –s, is identified as a regular feature of ELF. Breiteneder (2005: 10) provides an example of overgeneralisation in (14).
(14) That was a committee that mets every couple of months.
Here the third-person –s morpheme is added to the past tense verb met. The addition of the third-person –s could also occur with verbs which have plural subjects, as in Breiteneder‟s (2005: 10) example in (15).
(15) Many of the questions relates to the operation of the system itself.
With regard to the erratic omission of the third-person –s, Breiteneder (2005: 9) provides the example in (16).
(16) I suppose it‟s possible that e:r the thing function in both er possibilities. In this example, Standard English would require the third-person -s to be added to the verb
function in order to be grammatical. The author specifically notes that overgeneralisation
and erratic omission of the third-person -s does not affect mutual intelligibility between the participants (see Section 4.3.2 for a full analysis of third-person zero marking as it occurs in the data for this study).
Breiteneder suggests several possible linguistic and extra-linguistic reasons for the overgeneralisation and erratic omission of the third-person –s. Firstly, she suggests that the unpredictable nature of the present tense verb morphology of Standard English may lead to the lack of adherence to the rules and norms thereof. In addition, she suggests that this may also be contributed to by the fact that her participants‟ interactions were mainly of a transactional nature, therefore their ELF speech was driven by the goal of getting their messages across and not necessarily paying attention to the grammaticality of their utterances.
Breiteneder‟s participants make frequent use of a strategy which she calls “regularisation by analogy” (2005: 23). This strategy is used to normalise and simplify the seemingly unusual linguistic system of Standard English. Through the use of analogy, ELF speakers take note of the structure and use of present tense verbs they have come across before; they then apply this “regular pattern,” which results in speech that is economical, simple and does not differ too much from the norm. The implication drawn from this practice is that,
because the third-person-singular present tense verbs in English are the only verb forms marked by an –s morpheme, L2 speakers assume this to be a regular pattern of structure and use. This explains why verbs which do not take this grammatical marker are treated in ELF as similar to all other third-person singular verbs.
Another of Breiteneder‟s suggestions is that the conflict between the principles of grammatical- and notional concord as well as the principle of proximity could explain overgeneralisation and erratic omission of the third-person –s. Grammatical concord is a rule in Standard English according to which a verb must agree in number with its subject, as in (17).
(17) He paints the roof.
Here the verb paints agrees with its third-person-singular subject He, as is indicated by marking the verb with the third-person-singular morpheme –s. Notional concord is when the meaning of the subject, as opposed to its form, determines the choice of verb form, as illustrated in (18).
(18) You will have to ask the group and see what they say.
In this example, the group is seen as a plural noun (as is evident from the use of the pronoun they); the verb say agrees with this notion of plurality. Finally, the principle of proximity is when “the head of a noun phrase that functions as the subject of the utterance is grammatically singular, yet the verb is chosen in agreement with the closely preceding noun phrase” (Breiteneder 2005: 15). An example is in (19).
(19) Everyone apart from his sisters think it‟s a good idea.
In this example, think should agree in number with its singular subject Everyone but the verb is put in agreement with the closest preceding plural NP his sisters; this is explained through reference to the distance between the subject Everyone and its verb think. Even E- L1 speakers may at times utter deviations from the Standard English norm following these three principles. Once these principles become part of an L2 speaker‟s linguistic intuitions, Breiteneder suggests that ELF speakers may develop a grammar that differs from the Standard English norm. In this way, overgeneralisation and erratic omission of the third- person –s may be normalised, to some extent, in ELF.
There are even more suggested explanations for overgeneralisation and erratic omission of the third-person –s, namely that it is a result of consonant cluster reduction. The use of these two strategies aids the pronunciation of word-final clusters as in (20).
(20) The show last three hours.
Breiteneder mentions five instances of such simplification of consonant clusters in which the third-person –s is omitted, thus deviating from the Standard English norm, perhaps introducing a new ELF norm (Breiteneder 2005: 21).
Another possible explanation Breiteneder gives for the instability in the use of the third- person singular present tense –s, is an extra-linguistic one. She states that the omission of the third-person –s also features in situations of language contact. The author quotes Trudgill (2002) who reports that in East Anglia, the “third-person singular present tense zero is in origin a contact feature which developed as a result of the presence of large numbers of non-L1 speakers of English in Norwich who, in using ELF among themselves and with the native population, failed to master, as non-native speakers often do, the non- natural person-marking system of English verbs” (Trudgill 2002: 97 in Breiteneder 2005: 21). Breiteneder states that the ELF interactions in her data occur in multilingual settings, and may therefore be viewed as a type of language contact situation in which contact features arise of which, she suggests, overgeneralisation and erratic omission of the third- person –s are examples.
Finally, in a different ELF study, Cogo and Dewey (2006: 80) found that when there is an E-L1 speaker in an ELF interaction, the frequencies of the use of the third-person –s are higher than when there is no E-L1 speaker in the interaction. In interactions involving only ELF speakers, there is a tendency to use zero-marking of the third person verb form more frequently. The authors conclude that third-person zero “is emerging as the more characteristic, unmarked feature for present simple verb forms in ELF communication” (Cogo and Dewey 2006: 80) because the third-person –s morpheme on a simple present tense English verb is a linguistic “element so marked in nature (that) it is bound to be prone to change, especially in contact situations” (Cogo and Dewey 2006: 89).