Reduced Plural Verbal Ending in the Old English Bede and Some Other Translations from Latin of Mercian Origin

Abstract The use of the reduced plural verbal ending in the environments other than those immediately preceding a personal pronoun subject is one of the morphosyntactic differences between Anglian and Late West Saxon dialects of Old English. It occurs prominently in the copies of the Old English Bede . Whereas most studies focus on the tokens of the reduced ending in this text, this article expands the corpus to include Werferth’s translation of Gregory’s Dialogues, the Old English Martyrology , and Rushworth One to identify the environments in which the reduced ending occurs in texts of Mercian origin and environments in which it is replaced with a full ending in Saxonized copies. This examination shows that in this corpus the reduced ending occurs in the declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences. It is used in independent and dependent clauses in the present and preterite tenses in the indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and adhortative moods. Older and more conservative manuscripts contain more tokens of the reduced ending in all environments except when the verb immediately precedes a personal pronoun subject in the independent clause. However, there is no unambiguous correlation between the date of the manuscript and the number of the tokens of the reduced ending.