The DuMMy Auxiliary

Introduction to Modern English Exercise

The auxiliary verbs ‘be’, ‘have’, and ‘do’ are used with a main verb to form tenses, negatives, and questions. Charles Barber points out four syntactical main functions, through which he considers that auxiliaries are used before ‘not’ when a sentence is made negative; used before the subject of a sentence to form questions; used in echo-repetitions; when stressed used to assert emphasis to the truth of sentences’ ideological feature as a whole. The auxiliary ‘do’, is considered the ‘dummy auxiliary’, because according to Barber, ‘it performs the four main functions of an auxiliary, but empty of meaning’. This means that in verbal phrases ‘do’ is used when no other auxiliary is present.

The use of the auxiliary ‘do’ remotes back to Old English, not used as a dummy auxiliary rather had a causative sense. Barber explains, the causative sense in the sentence:

‘He did them a castle.’ as meaning in PdE ‘He caused a castle to be built.’

‘Do’ in the later case expresses cause, and doesn’t function as an auxiliary verb. This was mainly found in translations from the Latin, whereas by Shakespeare’s time its usage died completely, considered uncommon in Middle English. Barber argues that if we say 'he built a castle there', the verb tense ‘built’ already shows cause. In spoken language, people started to equate 'did build' with 'built', contributing for the development of the non-causative use of ‘do’.

Moreover, since the thirteenth century South-Western dialects, initially through poetry spreading rapidly to prose, the modern usage of ‘do’ most commonly grew. During the sixteenth century, ‘do’ becomes semantically an empty auxiliary, merely being a stylistic variant and appropriate mainly for negation. By the seventeenth century Scots-English influenced the southern General dialect. Terttu Nevalainen suggests that such dialect contact was due to the arrival of the Scottish court in London at the succession of King James in 1603, as such contributed for its present use of the auxiliary ‘do’.

To conclude, we know that in Present-day English (PdE) it is used to make negative and question forms from sentences that have a verb in the present simple or past simple. We can also use ‘do’ as a main verb with the auxiliary ‘do’, just as we can use the auxiliary ‘do’ with ‘have’ as a main verb. We only use ‘do’ in affirmative sentences for emphasis or contrast. We never use the auxiliary ‘do’ with ‘be’ except in the imperative.

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