158 O L G A F I S C H E R A N D W I M VA N D E R W U R F F

concerning the general rise of periphrastic constructions), so it cannot come as a surprise that this order became the preferred one in negative sentences and thus, as it were, forced do into the negative clause pattern.

Empirical evidence for the idea that the awkward place of adverbial not played a role can be found in Elleg˚ard (1953: 195), who notes that the use of do in negative sentences is consistently higher with transitive verbs than with intransitive verbs, thus stressing the importance of the need to keep main verb and object together. Secondly, there are a number of verbs that resist pre-placement of not and take longer to accept the do-periphrasis. This group consists of verbs such as say, think, hope, know, doubt, trow, woot, fear, etc. It is precisely this group of verbs with which negatives typically can have two different scopes: the scope can be over the matrix verb or just its complement. In most instances in which these verbs are used, however, the scope of the negative will be the complement rather than the verb itself, which means that the position of not after the verb is more appropriate for these verbs. Note that in tag expressions like I hope not, I think not, where the negative clearly concerns the content of the hoping and thinking, and not the absence of the mental action itself, postverbal placement of not is still the rule.

We have already seen that a large number of new periphrastic constructions developed in the ME period and beyond, to express tense, mood and aspect distinctions that had formerly been part of the inflectional form of the verb. Two points need to be discussed in connection with these new auxiliaries, namely the diachronic order in which they develop and occur combined with each other, and the linear sequencing of these auxiliaries at each synchronic stage. The more grammaticalised these auxiliaries became, the more strict we would expect their ordering principles to be (grammatical items are usually strictly bound in the syntax of the clause, which is much less true for fully referential lexical items). This expectation is fully borne out in the case of the grammatical markers in the verbal group; in fact, the developments here ultimately resulted in one of the most orderly and systematic areas of English syntax. Denison (2000a) provides a very useful overview of the earliest occurrence of various combinations of auxiliaries (see Table 3.3). Table 3.3 makes clear that the modals were the first to find a firm position in the auxiliary system; already in OE they freely combine with the passive auxiliary (It can be sung, not shown in Denison’s table), with perfect have

(He must have sung it) and with progressive be (He will be singing it), even though the latter two were only just developing. This is presumably because from the very beginning the modals were followed by infinitives, and it was only a small step from a full verb infinitive to an auxiliary-like infinitive. The combinations of other auxiliaries was in each case later because they first had to develop firm auxiliary status before they could be combined with verbs that they had never before been combined with. For instance, have was in OE only found with a past participle of a full, transitive verb. Only when have had lost its independent