The Auxiliary DO in English

Abstract

The DO auxiliary of English has either been dismissed as a meaningless 'dummy', whose purpose is purely positional, or, if treated as meaningful, it has been given special lexical meanings such as OCCURRENCE QUESTIONED (Penhallurick 1985) for which there is no lexical justification whatever. Starting from minimal pairs, it will be shown that the DO auxiliary is necessarily meaningful, and that when used contrastively it provides a dynamic reading for the verb phrase. Given that DO has such a generalized meaning that almost all other verbs may be considered its hyponyms, and given that all auxiliaries undergo 'esoteric subduction' (Guillaume 1938, 1964:75) or semantic bleaching, it will be proposed that DO, with its full verbal morphology, represents the occurrence of an event, and that its dependent infinitive clarifies, with its lexical precision, the nature of the event. It will also be argued that representing these two elements of the verb phrase separately is an elegant solution to cognitive problems confronted in the construction of interrogatives and negatives. The question of affirmative DO will also be addressed, and also the reason why this auxiliary is not normally used in the formation of the interrogative and the negative of the verb TO BE.