Linguistics 310: History of English
Project 2: The auxiliary verb 'do' across the centuries
Due date: Wednesday, November 16, 2016
As speakers of modern English, we use the auxiliary verb 'do' in a certain
fixed set of environments, basically the following:
- Negative sentences: Mary does not (doesn't) live here?
- Sentences with stress on the auxiliary: John doesn't like pizza but Mary DOES (like pizza).
- Questions: Does Mary live here? Where does Mary live?
- Other sentences where the subject and the auxiliary invert: Only Mary do we respect.
Our second project is an exploration of how far back this modern usage goes,
using the writings of three authors (more if you like): Chaucer, Shakespeare
and Milton. You can easily find all of the important texts of these authors
on the web and it is easy to search these texts, either by downloading them
to your computer or within a web browser. Using these resources, try to
figure out how the three authors use auxiliary 'do'. Here are some
questions to think about:
- What forms/spellings
do you find and what do these spellings indicate about the language of the
authors?
- In what types of sentences is 'do' found in each of the authors
and how often?
- How similar is the usage of each author to current day
language?
- How do the authors differ from one another?
Given that all three of our authors wrote iambic pentameter verse, you might be able to
use the poetry of each to tell us something about the frequency with which 'do' appears
in stressed versus unstressed positions in the line, especially compared to other
auxiliaries like 'be', 'have' and the modals.
Rather than just reporting your
general impressions, try to back up your statements with specific examples
and counts of the frequencies of different types of example. For example,
to get an idea of how frequently 'do' is used in negative sentences, you can
count the number of times 'not' appears as a sentence negative and of those
cases how many involve 'do'. The sentences of interest are the ones without
other auxiliaries, since such sentences can't have 'do':
- The righteous fear not death.
- The righteous do not fear death.
Be careful to look for alternate spellings and forms of both 'not' and 'do' in
accumulating your counts. You should be able to collect a total across all
texts of 150-250 examples of auxiliary 'do' for the project.