Interrogative and Negative Forms with Do.

The Early NE period witnessed the development of a new set of analytical forms which entered the paradigms of the Pres. and Past Tense of the Ind. Mood (and — to a lesser extent — of the Subj. Mood): interrogative and negative forms with the auxiliary verb do. These forms are known in English grammars as the “periphrasis with d” or “do-periphrasis”.

In ME the verb don was commonly used together with an Inf. to express a causative meaning.

In Early NE the causative meaning passed to a similar verb phrase with make, while the periphrasis with do began to be employed instead of simple, synthetic forms. Its meaning did not differ from that of simple forms.

At first the do-periphrasis was more frequent in poetry, which may be attributed to the requirements of the rhythm: the use of do enabled the author to have an extra syllable in the line, if needed, without affecting the meaning of the sentence. Then it spread to all kinds of texts.

In the 16th and 17th c. the periphrasis with do was used in all types of sentences — negative, affirmative and interrogative; it freely interchanged with the simple forms, without do.

Towards the end of the 17th c. the use of simple forms and the do-periphrasis became more differentiated: do was found mainly in negative statements and questions, while the simple forms were preferred in affirmative statements. Thus the do-periphrasis turned into analytical negative and interrogative forms of simple forms: Pres. and Past.

The growth of new negative and interrogative forms with do can be accounted for by syntactic conditions. By that time the word order in the sentence had become fixed: the predicate of the sentence normally followed the subject. The use of do made it possible to adhere to this order in questions, for at least the notional part of the predicate could thus preserve its position after the subject. This order of words was already well established in numerous sentences with analytical forms and modal phrases. Cf.: Do you pity him? No, he deserves no pity... (Shakespeare).

DEVELOPMENT OF NEW GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES.

Passive Forms. Category of Voice.

In OE the finite verb had no category of Voice. With the exception of some traces of the Germanic Mediopassive restricted to the verb hātan “call”, there was no regular opposition of forms in the verb paradigm to show the relation of the action to the grammatical subject. Only in the system of verbals the participles of transitive verbs, — Pres. and Past — were contrasted as having an active and a passive meaning.

The analytical passive forms developed from OE verb phrases consisting of OE bēon (NE be) and weorðan (“become”) and Part. II of transitive verbs.

OE bēon was used as a link-verb with a predicative expressed by Part. II to denote a state resulting from a previous action, while the construction with OE weorðan “become” indicated the transition into the state expressed by the participle.

In ME ben plus Past Part, developed into an analytical form. Now it could express not only a state but also an action. The formal pattern of the Pass. Voice extended to many parts of the verb paradigm: it is found in the Future tense, in the Perf. forms, in the Subj. Mood and in the non-finite forms of the verb.

Therefore we can say that the verb had acquired a new grammatical category — the category of Voice.

In Early NE the Pass. Voice continued to grow and to extend its application.

Late ME saw the appearance of new types of passive constructions. In addition to passive constructions with the subject corresponding to the direct object of the respective active construction, i.e. built from transitive verbs (see the above examples), there arose passive constructions whose subject corresponded to other types of objects: indirect and prepositional. Pass, forms began to be built from intransitive verbs associated with different kinds of objects, e.g. indirect objects.

Perfect Forms. Category of Time-Correlation.

Like other analytical forms of the verb, the Perf. forms have developed from OE verb phrases.

The main source of the Perf. form was the OE “possessive” construction, consisting of the verb habban (NE have), a direct object and Part. II of a transitive verb, which served as an attribute to the object.

The other source of the Perf. forms was the OE phrase consisting of the link-verb beon and Part. II of intransitive verbs.

Towards ME the two verb phrases turned into analytical forms and made up a single set of forms termed “perfect”. The Participles had lost their forms of agreement with the noun (the subject — in the construction with ben, the object — in the construction with haven); the places of the object and the participle in the construction with haven changed: the Participle usually stood close to the verb have and was followed by the object which referred now to the analytical form as a whole — instead of being governed by have.

By the age of the Literary Renaissance the perfect forms had spread to all the parts of the verb system, so that ultimately the cate­gory of time correlation became the most universal of verbal categories.

Continuous Forms. Category of Aspect.

The development of Aspect is linked up with the growth of the Continuous forms. In the OE verb system there was no category of Aspect; verbal prefixes especially 3e-, which could express an aspective meaning of perfectivity in the opinion of most scholars, were primarily word-building prefixes. The growth of Continuous forms was slow and uneven.

Verb phrases consisting of beon (NE be) plus Part. I are not infre­quently found in OE prose. They denoted a quality, or a lasting state, characterising the person or thing indicated by the subject of the sentence.

It was not until the 18^th c. that the Cont. forms acquired a specific meaning of their own. Only at that stage the Cont. and non-Cont. made a new grammatical category – Aspect. The meaning of non-Cont. — Indef. — forms became more restricted, though the contrast was never as sharp as in the other categories: in some contexts the forms have remained synonymous and are even interchangeable to this day (e. g. after while).

By that time the formal pattern of the Cont. as an analyti­cal form was firmly established. The Cont. forms were used in all genres and dialects and could be built both from non-terminative verbs, as in OE, and from terminative verbs. They had extended to many parts of the verb system, being combined with other forms. Thus the Future Cont. is attested in the Northern texts since the end of the 13th c; the first unambiguous instances of the Perf. Cont. are recorded in Late ME.

For many hundred years the Cont. forms were not used in the Pass.Voice. In Late ME the Active Voice of the Cont. form was sometimes used with a passive meaning.

The growth of grammatical categories in the verb paradigm in ME and Early NE periods is summarised in Table 7. The figures indicate the number of members distinguished within the categories.

Table 7

Development of Verbal Grammatical Categories