“The Use of the Auxiliary Do in Negation in Tom Jones and Some Other Literary Works of the Contemporary Period”

Although the major expansion of the auxiliary do in English is considered to have taken place in 1500-1700, it is not yet complete even in the 18th century. The present chapter discusses the negative constructions with a focus on the development of do in Tom Jones (1750), together with The Way of the World (1700), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Evelina (1778), and Sense and Sensibility (1811).

The result of the analysis demonstrates that do-less forms are still observed throughout the period under investigation. Do-less forms are particularly noticeable when forms of know, doubt, and have are involved, but even with other verbs they are not yet obsolete.

Some syntactic conditions seem to be relevant to the choice of negative constructions. Interrogative sentences and conditional clauses, for example, tend to favour the use of do, showing that the establishment of do-negation is more or less established there. On the other hand, do-less forms are still remnant in the preterite tense, which is linked to factuality, and imperative sentences, which tend to convey strong force of negation. On the basis of these pieces of evidence, the present paper argues that do-negation was to convey negation of weaker assertiveness, at least in the 18th century.

Related publications

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Jespersen’s Cycle and the Expansion of Periphrastic do in English”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 57: 99-133. (Downloadable PDF)
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Negation in Benjamin Franklin’s Writings: A Stylistic Analysis of his Autobiography and Letters”, in Proceedings of the 4th Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2018), Takamatsu, Japan, September 17-19, ed. Yukio Tono and Hitoshi Ishihara, pp. 178-183. (Downloadable PDF) Also downloadable at http://apcla.net/Proc.zip (large)