Re: Is "do" derived? (was Re: Question about "do")

Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:

> Roger Mills wrote:
> > "Do" also serves to replace a verb phrase in anaphora:
> > He likes toast and jam, and I do too, or
> > .........but I don't.
> >
> > And in the tag questions--
> > He likes toast and jam, doesn't he?
> > He doesn't like toast and jam, does he?
> >
> >  There's also the British usage (which may be on its way out, though one
> > still hears it in TV imports)--
> > He doesn't go to church as often as he used to do.
>
> For these reasons, I'm tempted to analyze the do forms as the *basic*
> form, with the "simple" present and past as being derived.  Thus, "He
> likes toast and jam" would be underlyingly "He does like toast and
> jam".  Thus, it behaves just like any other auxiliary "He will eat toast
> and jam, but I won't", "He has eaten the toast and jam, hasn't he?".
> The rule then being that when do is unstressed in an affirmative
> statement, the do-less forms are used.
The usual way of phrasing this is that tense is an obligatory
feature of English syntax, and the tense marker has to surface
in the morphology *somewhere*. Whether it surfaces on the auxilliary
or the lexical verb, the system doesn't much care.

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