Verb Morphology of South-Western Middle Scots (1)‪.‬

ABSTRACT The present paper focuses on the Middle Scots verbal inflections in the Scottish south-west, the region called Galloway. The manuscripts from the local archives are still virtually unknown to a wider public, which causes much imprecision and doubt in describing the position of Galloway on the map of Middle Scots dialectal areas. This study has been based on a collection of burgh court records from the burgh of Wigtown, dating back to the early 16th century, and concerns verbal inflections: the present participle, the third person singular present, the present plural, the regular preterite, the regular past participle and the irregular past participle. The paper presents the features of the manuscript compared with the Linguistic Profile (LP) of Wigtownshire included in The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (LALME). The analysis exposes mistakes committed by the authors of the atlas in the verbal inflections and puts forward a revised version of the LP, based on the manuscript data.