5 The language of transported Londoners Third person singular present tense markers in depositions of Londoners transported to Virginia and the Bermudas (1607 - 1624) LAURA WRIGHT 1 Introduction In present-day US Southern basilectal speech, the third person singular present tense is marked with both -s and zero. African American Vernacular English speakers and Southern White Vernacular English speakers both use the zero morpheme to mark this slot, but in differing amounts, with some AAVE speakers presently using it more frequently than SWVE speakers. This paper will discuss some historical data which contains both -s and zero, namely, the speech of prisoners transported from London in order to populate the Virginia settlement of Jamestown, from 1607 onwards. The data, taken from the manuscript Minutes of the Court of Governors of Bridewell and Bethlem for the years 1559-1624, is viewable on microfilm in the Guildhall Library, London. 2 Third person singular present tense zero: previous studies For a discussion of the third person singular -s and zero in AAVE and SWVE, see, for example, Fasold (1981), Sommer (1986), Poplack and Tagliamonte (1989, 1991, 1994), Baugh (1990), Ellis (1994), Montgomery, Fuller and DeMarse (1993), Montgomery and Fuller (1996), Wolfram, Hazen and Tamburro (1997), Winford (1998: 106), Montgomery (1999). Much of this work is devoted to analysing usage of -s v. zero in various speech-communities, black and white, past and present; considering whether third person singular zero was present in earlier states of English; and to debating whether the presence of zero supports the hypothesis of a creole origin for AAVE. For a recent discussion of Early Modern English third person singular -s see, for example, Taylor (1976), Schneider (1983), Stein (1985, 1987), Percy (1991), Kytö (1993), Ogura and Wang (1996), Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (eds 1996, 2000a). Here, the debate is more about the decline of -th and the entrance of -s in various environments than the presence of zero, and what -s and -th might have connoted sociolinguistically. By and large, in both the literature on AAVE/SWVE and Early Modern English, the present-tense indicative is treated, and the subjunctive, if mentioned at all, is mentioned in passing. 1 In section 3. I present some evidence to show that the speech of the English-speaking founder generation at Jamestown in 1607 contained third-person singular present tense zero, and I suggest that both the indicative and the subjunctive moods are relevant to this debate. Two works which also investigate third person singular markers in the speech of early settlers from Britain are Bailey, Maynor and Cukor-Avila (1989), which analyse the Cely Letters 1472-1488 (the Cely Letters are a body of correspondence written by a family of wool merchants who were based in London, although they may not all have been Londoners), and Bailey and Ross (1988), which analyses the ship’s logs of slavers 1631-1730. The Cely Letters were analysed in order to find out what London- based third person singular markers (and others) were like prior to shipment over to 1