1 [This is a pre-print version of a paper published in Words: Structure, meaning, function. A festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky . Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter 2000, 263-276] The third person present plural in Shakespeare’s First Folio: A case of interaction of morphology and syntax? Herbert Schendl 1. Introduction The aim of the present paper is to investigate morphological variation in and syntactic constraints on the 3 rd plural present indicative in Shakespeare’s First Folio, in particular in regard to the distribution of the –(e)s variant vs. the zero variant. As is generally known, the emerging Early Modern English standard variety still had a morphologically rather complex system of the present indicative with the following main features: while the 1 st person singular is consistently unmarked (Type: I make), the second person is inflected with –(e)st after the informal personal pronoun thou (Type: thou makest), but uninflected with the pronoun you/ye; in the third singular we find the well-described variation between –(e)th and –(e)s (he makes vs. he maketh). In the present plural indicative, the 1 st and 2 nd persons are predominantly unmarked, though occasionally the same inflected forms as with the 3 rd plural occur; the 3 rd person plural, on the other hand, shows variation between up to four variants in regionally unmarked Early Modern English texts (for the distribution of these variants see Holmqvist 1922, Wyld 1936, Franz 1939, Schlauch 1959, Barber 1997, etc.): (i) –Ø (drink), (ii) -(e)s (drinkes), (iii) –(e)th (drinketh), (iv) –(e)n (drinken). By Shakespeare’s time, the –(e)n variant had become a literary archaism, and the old southern form –(e)th was very rare (Barber 1997: 169ff.). Of the remaining two variants, the zero variant clearly predominated, though the –(e)s variant was by no means rare. The three main hypotheses about the origin of the –(e)s variant are that it is due (i) to Northern influence, (ii) to analogical extension from the 3 rd singular, (iii) to phonological factors (for a brief discussion of these hypotheses see Schendl 1996: 146f.). In a previous paper (Schendl 1996), I have provided convincing arguments for the first hypothesis, namely that Northern influence must be a main source for the 3 rd plural –(e)s variant. Of particular importance for this view is the fact that Early Modern English standard texts show quite a number of instances