16.1 Just do it
Here is an activity about do-support. Below it there is an explanation.
Look at this PDE sentence with its question form equivalent (we call the question form interrogative and the non-question form declarative):
Martin knows Mary → Does Martin know Mary?
- Describe as precisely as you can the ‘operations’ performed on the declarative form to turn it into an interrogative.
- Now form interrogatives from the declaratives below. Again, talk yourself through the operations involved.
Martin and Mary know Paul.
Paul knew Mary. - Try to formulate a ‘rule’ for forming interrogatives in PDE from declaratives like these.
Think next about modern day ‘positives’ (or affirmatives as they are usually called) and negatives; (in the example below, you might say doesn’t instead of does not):
Martin knows Mary → Martin does not know Mary
- Describe the operations involved here; then form negatives from the sentences in (b) above, and again describe the operations involved. Try to formulate a ‘rule’ for making negatives in English from affirmatives like these.
- Sometimes do is used in affirmative declarative sentences, like this: Martin does know Mary. When would you use this form, as opposed to Martin knows Mary? Try to think of an exact context, and attempt to formulate a ‘rule’ for the use of do in affirmative declaratives of this sort.
The activity shows that to form some (but not all) questions in PDE, we need to introduce a part of the verb do into the sentence. The activity’s example is Martin knows Mary. To change this to a question (with what is called the interrogative form), we use the relevant part of the verb do – in this case does. We follow this with the subject – Martin – and then the main verb (or lexical verb as it is called) in the infinitive form – know. This gives us Does Martin know Mary? In the case of the sentence Martin and Mary know Paul, the subject is a plural one, so the relevant part of do is do, and we get Do Martin and Mary know Paul? The other example in the activity is Paul knew Mary. Here the tense is simple past, so the form to use is did: Did Paul know Mary? Notice that in all these interrogative sentences, the tense is carried by the verb do, not the lexical verb – we cannot say *Did Paul knew Mary?
Many PDE negative sentences also use ‘do-support’. So the activity’s Martin knows Mary becomes the negative Martin does not know Mary. As with the interrogative, the part of do used will change according to meaning. So we find Martin and Mary do not know Paul (with a plural subject), and Paul did not know Mary (with the simple past tense).
The activity illustrates one other PDE use of do, to give emphasis in affirmative declarative sentences (‘affirmative’ means ‘non-negative’, and ‘declarative’ means ‘non-interrogative’). The example is Martin does know Mary. You might say this in a context where perhaps someone has just stated that Martin does not know Mary, and you want to disagree. So, to summarise, we can say that in PDE do-support is used to form many interrogative and negative sentences, and much less frequently in affirmative declarative sentences, for ‘special effects’.
16.2 An EModE corpus
How do linguists collect their information about how a language works and is used? Views can differ dramatically. In the 1960s and after, when the views of the linguist Noam Chomsky were predominant, ‘native speaker intuition’ – what the native speaker unconsciously knows about their language – was a prime source of information. A celebrated example involved the sentences John is easy to please and John is eager to please. On the ‘surface’ these sentences have identical structure. But every native speaker can tell you that while It is easy to please John is a possible sentence in English, *It is eager to please John is not.This indicates, Chomsky argued, underlying differences between the seemingly identical structures. Chomsky and his followers used information of this sort to explore the structure of English.
If native speaker intuitions can reveal so much about language structure, there is little point in collecting together large quantities of instances of language use. But in more recent times, ‘large quantities of instances’ are exactly what linguists have collected. These take the form of corpora (the singular is corpus, the Latin for ‘body’) – electronically scanned collections of texts adding up to millions of words. When it comes to the study of a language’s history, it is no exaggeration to say corpora have revolutionised the field. For one thing, there are no native speakers of OE, ME or EModE still alive, even if we did want to tap into their intuitions.
The corpus that Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) use is The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). This is a 2.7 million-word electronic collection of no fewer than 6000 letters written by 800 individuals between 1417 and 1681. It was compiled by these authors, working with a team at the University of Helsinki in 1993. In their 2003 book, they use the data to investigate 14 areas, including the use of ‘do-support’, and the -s versus-th suffix (both discussed in Chapter 16). In relation to these areas they consider the roles played by different variables including geographical region, social order, and gender – in 8 out of the 14 areas they find that women adopt new variants earlier than men.
As its name shows, the CEEC is a specialised corpus, containing only correspondence. The Helsinki Corpus of English Text, developed by teams including Rissanen and Kytö, covers more genres. It also deals with OE, ME and EModE, so is particularly useful for studies covering a wide time span. This corpus is mentioned again in 19.4.1.
Yet another corpus relevant to the EModE period is the Corpus of English Dialogues, 1560–1760. This collection of about 1.2 million words consists of ‘authentic dialogues’ – records of trial proceedings, for example, and ‘constructed dialogues’, as they appear in drama, as well as didactic works such as language teaching texts. The corpus is used by Culpeper and Kytö (2010) as the basis for their analysis of spoken interaction of the time.
Then, finally, there is the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from British English in the later part of the twentieth century. You can imagine how helpful such a collection is to linguists exploring PDE usage. You can read about the BNC here