Is mother cooking?

Does he smile?

The same phenomenon is observed in sentences like Little does he expect it, indeed. Also for emphasis in sentences like We do like it. The tendency to detach the structural part of the predicate from its notional one is obvious in disjunctive questions. The same tendency is evident in sentences like She hasn’t come yet. Neither has her sister.

English has developed special word-morphemes to separate the structural part of the subject from the notional one – it, there, the structural part of the predicate from the notional one – do, does, did.

A.I. Smirnitsky is of the opinion that does … smile, do … know and did… come are analytical forms of the verb serving to express interrogation, negation and emphasis. There are good reason for disagreement, since the do-word-morphemes differ essentially from morphological word-morphemes will in will come, has in has come:

1. morphological word-morphemes are combinable – shall have been asked. The word-morphemes do, does, did don’t form combinations with any morphological word-morphemes;

2. all the words of the lexemes represented by have, be, shall and will are used as word-morphemes – have written, has written, had written, to have written, having written. With do it is different.

One says Do not come but to do not come or doing not come is impossible;

3. the use of the do-word-morphemes fully depends on the type of the sentence

What book do you sell? What books are you selling?

What books sell best? What books are selling best?

Thus, the do-word-morphemes are not parts of analytical words, they are syntactical word-morphemes used in certain types of sentences when the predicate verb contains no morphological word-morphemes.

It should be noted, that some scholars use only one term — predication to denote both the relation of the sentence to reality and means of its expression.

A sentence may contain primary and secondary predication:

I heard someone ringing

The group someone ringing is called the secondary predication, as it resembles the subject-predicate group, or the primary predication, structurally and semantically: it consists of two main components, nominal and verbal, and names an event or situation. But it cannot be correlated with reality directly and cannot constitute an independent unit of communication, as verbals have no categories of mood, tense and person. The secondary predication is related to the situation of speech indirectly, through the primary predications.

As the bus was very crowded john had to stand. (primary)

The bus being crowded John had to stand. (secondary)

It is not possible that he should do it alone. (primary)

It is not possible for him to do it alone. (secondary)

I resent that you have taken the book. (primary)

I resent your having taken the book. (secondary)

Secondary predications or complexes may be regarded as a transformation of some actual predication.

3. As is well-known, sentences may be classified on the basis of two main principles: structural (simple and composite, one-member and two member, complete and elliptical) and communicative (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory).

In the language system certain sentence-patterns arc correlated and are connected by oppositional relations: statement/question (He knows it – Does he know it?), non-negative/negative structures (Does he know it? — Doesn't he know it?), non-emphatic/emphatic structures (Come! — Do come!).

Syntactic oppositions reveal syntactic categories (their number varies with different scholars).

Members of syntactic oppositions can be regarded as grammatical modifications, or variants of sentence patterns. Thus, the syntactic structure of the sentence may be represented by a number of forms, which constitute the paradigm of the sentence.

Lecture Nine