The Rise and Fall of Constructions and the History of EnglishDo-Support

Abstract

Do-support is a unique characteristic of English. Many languages other than English have do-periphrasis but not English-type do-support. This raises the obvious question: What is special about English? The goal of this paper is to provide an account of English do-support that explains why do-support, with its attendant properties, is found uniquely in English. I review the classical derivational approaches to do-support and argue that they do not satisfactorily capture the generalizations. I suggest an alternative, non-derivational account of contemporary dosupport that makes crucial use of constructions. Finally, I propose an account of the history of do-support in English that characterizes the changes in terms of the content and scope of constructions. The rise of do-support can be understood as a consequence of the contraction and re-specialization of particular constructions in the wake of welldocumented changes in the overt morphological system of the language. for discussion, insight, advice, encouragement, and all manner of assistance. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for a number of useful comments and suggestions. I am solely responsible for the errors that remain. 2 Culicover

The Acquisition of Do-Support in Negation and Interrogatives by Adult Arab Learners of English: A Preliminary Study

“…In interrogatives, on the other hand, a verbal element must move to the head position C of theCP attracted by the strong feature of C, and since thematic verbs must remain in situ, a proper element manifested as do-support must first host the unattached tense affix in TP and move from there to occupy the C position of the CP (Radford, 2006). Accordingly, do-support is an English phenomenon where the dummy auxiliary verb 'do' appears bearing tense and agreement morphology in certain environments: do appears in the presence of sentential negation, T-to-C movement, emphasis and VP-ellipsis when there is no auxiliary verb functions as a tense-bearer in these environments (Ecay, 2015).Moreover, unlike other auxiliaries that are classified as having universal status, 'do' is classified as a languagespecific property of English (Culicover, 2008). Its VP complement must be [-AUX] and since the operation of do-support is a phonetic and for syntactic reasons and contributes nothing to the semantic meaning of the statement, 'do' does not have any intrinsic meaning in contrast to other auxiliary verbs (Jung Jo, 2004).…”

The Structure of Syntactic Typologies

“…At this point the analysis of variation that is on the table provides a separate statement encoding the choice of form for each ‘construction’, along the lines just sketched. It is telling that the non‐uniform distribution of DS in Monnese leads Culicover (, p. 32) to conclude that it is not a real case of DS but rather an instance of ‘ do ‐periphrasis’, a separate construction. Non‐uniformity, under the assumptions he is working with, necessitates proliferation of constructions.…”

The Markedness in Acquiring Do-support in Negation and Inversion by Adult Native-Arabic Speakers Learning English

“…Historically, its emergence was linked to the loss of V (verb)-to-T (tense) raising that emerged in the 15th and 16th centuries and the other changes that followed including, the loss of the pre-verbal 'ne' and the appearance of post-verbal 'not' as the marker of sentential negation (Culicover 2008). Accordingly, dosupport has been considered as one of the marked features accounting for cross-linguistic variations between English and other languages.…”