A Study of the Auxiliary DO in English

Abstract

The use of the auxiliary DO is one of the most striking features of present-day English and there has been a wide range of analyses of the auxiliary DO, but its status and distribution is where most grammarians disagree. This paper shows that there are some auxiliaries including DO to which Kim (2000)'s English Conversion Lexical Rule cannot apply.It further shows that the very fact that the auxiliary DO lacks its semantic value makes it necessary for the auxiliary DO to be understood in a different perspective from other auxiliaries when discussing the relation between negation, stress and scope. It also presents a way to deal with Sag's(2001) anti-focus property of the polarized auxiliaries by developing type constraints on stressed auxiliariesand employing the multiple inheritance hierarchy. The partition of STRESS will be added to Warner's(2000) partial inheritance hierarchy of finite auxiliaries and the approach of Minimal Recursion Semantics will be used in the course of developing some constraints on the types stressed and unstressed. The conclusion is that the multiple inheritance hierarchy coupled with the approach of minimal recursion semantics provides a clearer and more succinct account of the auxiliary DO in negation than the lexical rule.