Introduction

A dimension on which children might be expected to differ is the extent to which auxiliaries remain context restricted, or are applied to a variety of available contexts fairly quickly. In certain cases context-restricted usage would also indicate unanalysed usage. This is amenable to investigation by examining the set of main verbs with which specified auxiliary forms, or subforms co-occur. The forms chosen must, however, occur with sufficient regularity to allow comparisons both between children, and within children over time. For this reason, Chapters 8 and 9 concentrate on do and can as the forms which occur most frequently.

doas an operator

In standard English, forming the negative and in most cases the interrogative of main verbs requires do-insertion (see Section 1.5). Auxiliary do, therefore, plays a central role in the development of negation and questions. Like other auxiliaries, it is also available for emphasis and ellipsis. It can be supplied as a means of stressing the propositional truth of the predicate of a clause containing no auxiliary (# ‘He went out’ → # ‘He 'did go out’) and functions as an operator (with or without emphasis) where there is ellipsis of the main verb (# ‘He did’).

Unstressed forms

As a consequence of the limitation of auxiliary do to the NICE operations and its lack of independent propositional content, its paradigm is deficient in comparison with that of other auxiliaries; there is no place for do forms which are unstressed, declarative and affirmative (UDAs). Palmer (1965) suggests that such forms occur in ‘code’ (ellipsis) but their existence is difficult to substantiate.