Laura Wright

             Over the last few decades, third-person present-tense indicative singular -s and zero in AAVE and SWVE have attracted much attention.  This paper relates to the debate about whether third-person singular zero was present in earlier states of British English (which is relevant to whether the presence of zero supports the hypothesis of a creole origin for AAVE).  It has been assumed that the zeroful dialects of British English are/were those of East Anglia: “third-person singular present-tense zero was a feature of certain British Isles dialects, and the obvious explanation was that Black varieties had acquired and retained this original British Isles feature, while White dialects for the most part had not.  The British Isles dialects in question, of course, were those of the English region of East Anglia” (Trudgill (2001: 180), talking about the origins of AAVE).
            This paper challenges the ‘of course’ in the quotation above by presenting some data from London and Oxfordshire in 1837, and some data from the West Country found in the Survey of English Dialects from the 1950s.  The data from 1837 comes from the diary of a London footman who was born in Grafton in West Oxfordshire in 1807 and who came to work for an old lady in London, probably some time in his late twenties.  As this footman was notably zeroful, and as Oxfordshire formed part of the old kingdom of Wessex, I searched the SED holdings for Wessex for third-person zero.  These findings will be presented, and it will be suggested, following Klemola (2002), that the distribution found in SED can be assumed to hold good for earlier centuries. 
            The paper will conclude that British Isles English has been far more zeroful than has hitherto been appreciated.

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