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Introduction

The introduction has been added to ensure that encyclopedic need (need to include information on a commonly mentioned topic) does not purport support of an erroneous concept.

I have undone the edit by USER:Angr (edited part of the introduction out citing removal of opinion) because the information provided is not opinion.

I understand that it is counter to the information provided in the body of the article and is in fact counter to what is included in the majority of grammar texts (especially those published by ESL publishers), but in fact it is not opinion. The idea of "do-support", "pro-verbs", and "dummy verbs" are however opinion. They are concepts based on fallacious analyses of the English language and are known to be non-functional in most instances.

Having no linguistic basis, and being the cause of so much confusion and frustration among learners of English, my preference would be to delete the article entirely as I have spent 20 years dealing with the damage caused to learners by promoting these ideas. However, these ideas are common, and as such, people will see this words out there and should be able to look them up somewhere. It is important though that when they do encounter an article on them, especially from a trusted sources such as WP, that a disclaimer be provided that both establishes these concepts as what they are while also providing a brief explanation of the correct analysis and justification for classifying them as linguistically incorrect.

Please do not revert without further linguistic discussion of the information provided. Drew.ward (talk) 14:30, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Please read WP:BRD. Making a bold change is fine (like you did), but when someone else reverts that change (like I did), the next step for you is to discuss without reverting back to the contentious edit. As for the content of the page, it's simply a descriptive fact of English that do-support occurs in questions and negatives when no other auxiliary is present. You say it has "no linguistic basis", but it has a clear linguistic basis, namely the following data, whose accuracy I trust you do not deny:
(1a) John rides the bus.
(1b) John does ride the bus.
(2a) John rides not the bus.
(2b) John does not ride the bus.
(3a) Rides John the bus?
(3b) Does John ride the bus?
In each pair, the (a) sentence has no do-support and the (b) sentence has do-support, and that's all the term "do-support" refers to: the replacement of a finite form of a lexical verb with the corresponding finite form of do followed by the "base form" of the lexical verb. In English, the unmarked sentences in each pair are (1a), (2b), and (3b), while (1b) is used only for emphasis, and (2b) and (3b) are archaic but may still occur in poetry. This isn't fallacious, and it isn't a lie to ESL/EFL students; it's just a fact of English grammar. The term "do-support" by itself does not make any claim as to why or how this substitution occurs. It occurs in English under certain circumstances, and it occurs in other languages under other circumstances (a fact which needs to be discussed in the article; for example, in Manx, finite forms of lexical verbs occur very rarely: in most circumstances, a finite form of do or be is used in conjunction with the verbal noun, so in that language, do-support is more widespread than in English). Now, linguists may argue about the cause and analysis of do-support (is it caused by insertion where it appears, or is it there from the beginning and then suppressed where it does not appear?), but argument about the theoretical analysis of do-support doesn't change the fact that it exists as a phenomenon in the grammar of English (and other languages). —Angr (talk) 21:06, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

First, full disclosure: I created this page. That said, I agree that it is insufficient and needs a more world-wide view, among other shortcomings.

Second, to the substance of this dispute: I do not agree that material added by Drew.ward is an improvement in terms of the coverage or information of this article. Since the additions were unsourced and appear to reflect original research by user Drew.ward, they should therefore not be added to the article.

Third, to the notions of "encyclopedic need" and the role of subject-matter experts: Misplaced Pages policy is not to publish new analyses that its editors deem superior to previous ideas. (See also the essay Misplaced Pages:But it's true!) Instead, Misplaced Pages reflects the consensus view and main minority views of previously published work. (See also the policy statements Misplaced Pages:Core content policies and Misplaced Pages:Verifiability.) In this sense it is more like a textbook than a scientific journal. Subject matter experts (and by the way, it is my understanding that both Angr and Drew.ward are professional linguists, as am I) should verify that content on Misplaced Pages pages accurately reflects reliably published sources, and that those sources do not represent fringe theories within our fields. However, subject matter experts should never succumb to the temptation to underplay theories we disagree with nor to label them as fallacious. (See also the policy statement Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view.) Cnilep (talk) 00:39, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Two subtle questions

Since a recent correction, this page declares, "Except in copular sentences such as Is he here? or They are not banjo players (and except in have questions like have you any bananas, which are permissible in some but not all dialects), in English all questions and all sentences with negative polarity feature an auxiliary verb."

This is not strictly true, as exemplified by Angr's examples above, or literary usages such as "No, no, go not to the Lethe". Is it worth getting into the particulars, I wonder? The pre-correction version was no truer: "In English, all questions and all sentences with negative polarity feature an auxiliary verb."

A second, related question: I added (originally in a footnote) the bit about "Have you any bananas?" I know that some speakers use main-verb have without do, and that it sounds slightly odd to me. I wonder, though, whether this is a case of WP:You don't need to cite that the sky is blue, or if some readers or editors may doubt it?　Cnilep (talk) 03:07, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Regarding your first point, I actually thought of that when I wrote it, but wrongly decided to ignore the out-of-the-ordinary constructions in the interest of keeping the sentence from getting too long. I'll put in "almost" for strict correctness. However, I think that "John rides not the bus" and "Rides John the bus?" are poor examples -- those forms would be extremely rare. A better example would be "John rides the bus?" I'll put that in as an exception.
Regarding your second point: It sounds a bit odd to me too, but only because I'm American. But I do see it a lot from British speakers -- both the form "Have you any bananas" and, more commonly, the form "I haven't any bananas". I don't think it needs to be cited, because I think any Briton would say it's a sky-is-blue thing. Duoduoduo (talk) 15:21, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
I have to agree with Duoduoduo here, "Have you any bananas?" is grammatically incorrect and thus shouldn't be taken into account. It is commonly used by some speakers particularly in parts of the UK but it is not a correct form. It has come about due to speakers confusing have as a perfecting auxiliary "You have eaten -- Have you eaten?" with have as a main verb "You (do) have a cold -- Do you have a cold?" but not "Have you a cold?". Drew.ward (talk) 01:59, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
Under normal circumstances "commonly used by some speakers" is virtually equivalent to "grammatically correct", at least within traditions of descriptive and theoretical linguistics. See Linguistic description and Grammaticality, inter alia. Cnilep (talk) 04:12, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
Just because an error is common does not make it grammatical. I can go out into the street and here "She be hatin on him" but to include it in a reference to English grammar would be wrong because no matter how many people say it, it's grammatically incorrect. Drew.ward (talk) 13:41, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
No, we have to be descriptive here. There are dialects in which "Have you any bananas?" is grammatical and other dialects in which it is ungrammatical or at least very odd. It would violate both Misplaced Pages's NPOV policy and all standards of scientific endeavor for the article to call "Have you any bananas?" an error. (Incidentally, I'm not a speaker of British English, but I believe that most Brits would be more like to say "Have you got any bananas?" than "Have you any bananas?".) Angr (talk) 20:55, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
Being descriptive does not include misinforming readers. It's obvious that "Have you any bananas?" is incorrect in Standard English. This is not an article on language theory, and obviously there are too many "dialects" to describe here. How is it NPOV to describe only one when we can admit that it's not Standard English? I think we've already covered ourselves with the "almost" qualifiers, and we don't need to get into non-standard usage. Please remember that this page is very useful for ESL students and teachers, and that "Have you any something?" is a common mistake among beginners and intermediates. David.f.dana (talk) 16:21, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
Since there is no single monolithic "Standard English", you cannot say it is "incorrect in Standard English". English has more than one standard, and "Have you any bananas?" is correct in some standard varieties of English, and incorrect in other standard varieties. Angr (talk) 18:05, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
  • OK I just reworded that paragraph to include the colloquial "Have you a..." example but to label it appropr'ately. I also rewrote most of it, but kept the same points. As most of you know, I don't buy into this idea of do-support and it's not something that could in the slightest bit be linguistically justified. That said, for some reason the consensus on here is that this weird idea is to be the official wikipedia version of English grammar so I didn't "correct" it as I feel would be the academically responsible thing to do. What I have done though it clarify some of the ways that first paragraph was worded to ensure that most of the missing understanding of what goes on in English verb forms is at least somewhat accounted for so that readers upon consideration of the article may themselves surmise the actual linguistic happenings that proponents of do-support attempt to account for with this theory. Hopefully this is an adequate compromise.Drew.ward (talk) 19:37, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
Do-support isn't a theory; it's a descriptive fact. You yourself just wrote "I didn't 'correct' it", using do-support. You didn't write "I 'corrected' it not". Anyway, I had to revert your changes because they were incomprehensible. I have no idea what "an unperfected, simple aspect verb" or "vocal auxiliary" means, and the sentence was long and rambling and very difficult to follow, including multiply nested parenthetical tangents. Finally, you called the American English constructions "Do you have a pen?" and "No, I don't have a pen" standard, although they are not standard in British English. Angr (talk) 07:06, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
Well now I'm unreverting it because saying you don't like something and calling it incomprehensible because you personaly don't understand the concepts are not grounds for reverting a change. If you don't know what these things are maybe you should either ask or research before rejecting them. A vocal auxiliary is an auxiliary used to signify voice (as in active, passive, or middle voice). In English the two vocal auxiliaries are BE and GET with BE being far more common than GET in that usage. Unperfected means that the verb has not been perfected - or in simple terms that the grammatical structure of the verbal construction has not been preempted by the perfecting auxiliary HAVE with the following verb put in the past participle form. If you don't know simple aspect is, I really don't think you need to be arguing anything on here...
I (and the others you're opposing on here regarding the 'have you bananas' issue) have not asserted preference over American or British varieties. The use of have without auxiliary do is neither standard in the UK nor in the US. It is however a colloquial construction found in both varieties albeit all but limited to older literary sources in American varieties these days. Just because you or people around you use this construction does not nor has it ever made it standard. No one's calling wrong, or incorrect, or less desirable. Get over yourself. It's not standard English; it's colloquial and when you consider the small number of speakers out of the 400-500 million native and near native English speakers in the world, it's rare. Providing reference to it while classifying it as a regional colloquialism (which it is) is the best compromise possible while not confusing readers or destroying the quality of this article.
Finally, if as you say, "Do-support isn't a theory; it's a descriptive fact," then prove it. I have neither edited out the content of this article asserting the acceptance of this theory, nor have I presented an alternative. I know it's not correct and I know that's true because it cannot be linguistically proven because the only way to buy into the idea of do-support is to ignore huge chunks of well-proven linguistic attributes of English grammar. I've already fought the fight on here to have this article label do-support' as the non-universally accepted theory that it is. The consensus on here has been that despite ample proof (easily explained proof) that it's incorrect, that wikipedia won't classify it as anything but true and the only wiki-approved explanation of what DO is in English whether it works or not. If you are so sure of yourself, why don't you do what no one else on here has ever been willing to do: provide irrefutable proof that do-support is correct. Proof by the way is not sources or citing it's being mentioned on websites or in books or in grammar guides. Proof is actual, accepted linguistic proof that provide an explanation that works 100% of the time, has no exceptions, cannot be disproven, and does not require a specialised version of syntactic theory that applies only to the English language. Go ahead. Let's see you do it.
I'm guessing you'll just take the easy way out, throw a fit approach that everyone else on here takes when called out and pack up your toys and say you don't have to prove anything because this is what it is or some other excuse. I'm hoping though that you'll be a better man (or woman) than that and take the effort to stand by your claim and provide proof. Let's see...
I am going to now revert back the change to the last version I added. In doing so, I will however look through it and see if I can reformat it to be clearer or more easily read. Until you can take the time to reply to the points above though here on the talk page, I think it apt that you not revert what I've written again. If what I've written is wrong and what you've written is right, then you should be able to easily prove it at which point I will gladly do the revert for you myself. Additionally, if the style or wording of my version bother you, then without changing the content, why not recommend or make some subtle changes as you feel would be required to rectify your perceived issues?Drew.ward (talk) 17:43, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
OK, I have reverted to the previous version, but have then moved the majority of inline examples to hover boxes and provided hover box definitions for all of the terminology that confused you. Hopefully this version is easier to read.Drew.ward (talk) 18:57, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
Once again, please see Misplaced Pages:Core content policies, Misplaced Pages:Verifiability, and Misplaced Pages:But it's true! It is not Misplaced Pages policy that English has do-support. It is Misplaced Pages policy that Misplaced Pages articles reflect reliable third-party sources; it is sources such as Traugott and Pratt 1980, Kaplan 1989, and most English grammars that assert the existence of do-support. It may be appropriate for Misplaced Pages editors to argue about the adequacy of those sources as sources, but Misplaced Pages is not the appropriate forum to argue that most existing grammars are wrong and that one or several Wikipedians know better. Cnilep (talk) 00:20, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
OK, if it's verifiable, find me a single source that can verify that do-support is linguistically sound by proving it to be correct. One source or a hundred sources that say something without proving it to be true have no more value than having no sources at all. If it's so easily clear and such a sound concept, why can't any of you find a single nugget of support other than source after source that says 'this is what it is' without themselves providing any support or defense at all? You guys all I'm sure have the best of intentions regarding the quality of articles on here, so if you do, find proof for do-support. And if you can't, either delete the article or reword it to point out that it is an unfounded theory. You guys need to be holding yourselves to the same standards as you're holding me in regard to this discussion. So?Drew.ward (talk) 01:53, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Here are a few.

  • Brinton, Laurel; Brinton, Donna (2010). The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins. p. 234. So a verbal element must be supplied by inserting the dummy auxiliary do. This serves the function of an auxiliary when there is no other independent auxiliary present. This insertion transformation is called do-support.
  • DeCapua, Andrea (2008). Grammar for Teachers. Springer. p. 5. Therefore, to make these sentences into questions, we need to add something to the position before the noun phrase. This "something" is the auxiliary do, which functions to "fill" the auxiliary slot before the noun phrase in question.
  • Freidin, Robert (1982). Foundations of Generative Syntax. MIT Press. p. 171. The distribution of this auxiliary can be accounted for via a substituion transformation that inserts the auxiliary do (not to be confused with the verb do) into an empty auxiliary position in Infl.
  • Heidinger, Virginia (1984). Analyzing Syntax and Semantics. Gallaudet U Press. p. 82. In the sample question, do must be inserted. Without do the questions would be The baby walks? and *When your guests arrived? Although The baby walks? is grammatical, and it asks a question, it does not have the syntactic form of a question.
  • Huddleston, Rodney D.; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2005). A Student's Introduction To English Grammar. Cambridge U Press. p. 152. Negative clauses of this kind require the presence of an auxiliary verb. If there is no auxiliary in the corresponding positive clause, formation of the negative involves the insertion of do as described in Ch. 3, §3.1, and illustrated in
  • Klammer, Thomas P. (2006). Analyzing English Grammar. Pearson/Longman. p. 261. It appears only in sentences that have undergone some kind of transformation. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

These come from generative grammar, phrase structure grammar, and pedagogical grammars. They are not bound to a single school or approach and are certainly not fringe theories. I would suggest that any argument rejecting these and the many similar grammars of English is better suited to linguistics journals and not to Misplaced Pages. Cnilep (talk) 03:27, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Those are all just statements. They don't justify it at all. They don't explain what the role of do is, how they justify treating this particular use of an auxiliary verb differently from all others in English, or how they justify using a unique version of syntax for English that can't be applied to any other language (and which only works in English sometimes). Can you provide actual research and proof?Drew.ward (talk) 05:41, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
You can't blame me for not understanding your text when you don't use words in their usual meanings. "Vocal" is never used as the adjective of "voice" in the sense of "active/passive/middle voice". The verb "to perfect" (from which you are deriving "unperfected") doesn't mean "to put into perfective aspect". When you invent your own personal technical vocabulary, you cannot be surprised when other people fail to understand you. Next, when you say I have to "prove" that do-support exists in English, I repeat what I said before: you use it yourself in your comments here. In your comments above, you wrote "Well now I'm unreverting it because saying you don't like something and calling it incomprehensible because you personaly don't understand the concepts are not grounds for reverting a change" and "why don't you do what no one else on here has ever been willing to do", with do-support at the underlined passages. How can you deny that do-support exists when you use it consistently yourself? I think you have misunderstood what the term "do-support" refers to: it does not refer to a specific syntactic theory of how "do" gets inserted into questions and negatives. Rather it refers only to the descriptive fact about English that the negative of "John goes" is "John does not go" rather than *"John goes not", and the question form of "John goes" is "Does John go?" rather than *"Goes John?". That's all "do-support" refers to. Denying that do-support exists in English would be like denying that nouns and verbs exist, or that vowels and consonants exist. Angr (talk) 14:43, 24 June 2012 (UTC)


I don't USE do-support. No one does because there's no such thing as do-support. All that do-support refers to is a misled attempt by grammarians (the main original push for spreading this idea coming from the ESL industry) who, lacking the basic linguistic competencies to understand the functions of the English verbal system in expressing aspect, mood, tense, and the like, to come up with an explanation for why (in their mistaken view) DO seemingly appeared out of nowhere in certain constructions (some questions, negatives, and some emphatics, as well as some "short forms".
This was during a time when attempts to decipher English grammar were still based off the now universally-abandoned view that English could and should be forced into the mold of the grammar of classical Latin. Further complicating things, it wasn't until around the second world war that our understanding of the ways in which Germanic languages convey aspect, aktionsart, perfection (which by the way is different from 'perfective aspect' which is an entirely different concept), tense and mood. The original works proclaiming do-support were written before this modern understanding became common knowledge. The English-grammar world ended up with two competing schools, on one hand you had philologists, linguists, modern grammarians, and experts on the language who equipped with modern scientific tools and understanding worked through much of the 20th century to rid documentation of the language including grammars of the many erroneous theories that ran counter to linguistic common sense (such as the prohibition on split infinitives, forbidding prepositions at the ends of a sentence, and many analyses based on explaining English in terms of Latin or Greek grammar). On the other side were educational publishing houses, grammar book authors, and ESL training companies all who had and continue to have a vested interest in protecting the "truth" of the fortunes they have riding on the thousands and thousands of course books, grammar books, textbooks, ESL curricula, etc that fuel their billions of dollars a year industry. The one thing an industry based on educating people is to admit they had gotten lots of it wrong and even worse to admit that they've known it was incorrect for decades yet have chosen to keep pushing the version of English grammar in their books and courses than to issue corrected ones because there was too much money at stake. Plus, because things like do-support and the ESL-specific usage guidelines on when to use which form of a verb don't make any sense, are confusing, and contradictory, they get to spend years longer selling class time to learners trying to get them past their natural justified confusion. That means more schools charging tuition, more companies charging franchise fees, more books to be printed and sold, and more teachers paying to be trained (because not even native speakers can intuitively understand this crap). I suppose what's good for all these guys is that Misplaced Pages and all of the editors like you guys who would rather maintain the status quo than go out and try to find something proving or linguistically justifying do-support, are being gladly complicit by treating this idea as a proven concept. I'm sure they're appreciative.
None of us use do-support. What we do use, is the appropriate aspectual auxiliary verb along with the specific form of the main verb it requires to put each verbal construction into the correct aspect we need to express the information we desire. Because in English, all verbs have as part of the intrinsic meanings qualities of duration and completeness and such (aktionsart) which establishes the primary force of these qualities, aspect and perfection are used only to emphasize of override those qualities. When a speaker needs to express information about a verb regarding duration, and that verb does not already naturally have a durational quality to it, he uses the continuous/progressive aspect to mark that durational quality via use of a grammatical form (the aspectual auxiliary BE with the main verb in present participle form). If however that main verb already has duration as part of its meaning, he needs not use an additional duration-marking form and instead uses the verb in the neutral 'simple' aspect which simply leaves the verb's inherent qualities as they are. The grammatical form used in this instance is the aspectual auxiliary DO with the main verb in base form. The using a verb in the simple aspect maintains its native qualities of duration and such. Using a verb in the progressive aspect adds duration if none exists, and if the inclusive verb already has a durational aktionsart, then is simply allows for emphasis or amplification of this durational quality.
A verb in either of these aspects may be similarly modified with perfection. Just as each very carries within its meaning duration or a lack thereof, they are also inherently naturally completed or not completed. Verbs like die, swallow, finish, etc obviously and naturally end as part of their basic meaning and thus have an easily perceived termination. Other verbs like live, play, eat, etc have no such natural termination. If a speaker has need to point out, discuss, draw attention to, or emphasize the completion (and particularly the temporal point of completion) of one of these naturally-non-completed verbs, he has to use a special grammatical form consisting of the perfecting auxiliary HAVE with the verb following it placed in past participle form. Together this combination of auxiliary plus specific verb form convey completeness and allow the quality to be added in a situation in which the meaning of the inclusive verb did not already express it, or to emphasize it (just as the progressive aspect adds or emphasizes duration) when the inclusive verb is naturally completed through the grammar of the sentence in which the verb appears.
It is this combination of these two tools of aspect and perfection, combined with the primacy of every verb's aktionsart that allow for the expression of the full range of temporal information possible in the English language (and in varying forms, this same process occurs in every other language as well with the shape of those processes mostly dependent on how strongly governing the role of aktionsart is in each particular language). When those who first pioneered these theories like do-support and the various ESL-centric versions of when to use which forms, they did so with no knowledge of what these very simple tools of aspect and perfection actually did, and without even realising that aktionsart even existed. That's why their ideas were wrong a hundred years ago and that's why no matter how many grammar guides or course books keep including them, they are just as wrong today (even worse of course wrong and they know it).
Now, why does DO suddenly appear out of nowhere? It doesn't. And had they recognized what aspect was at the time, they would have never assumed such a thing to be happening. Every verbal construction expresses aspect and this is done as mentioned above via an aspectual auxiliary followed by its subordinate in a specific form. Both are required and when a given auxiliary is followed by a subordinate in a different form, it means it's not actually acting to convey aspect. Consider BE: "BE + present participle" = progressive aspect; "BE + past participle" = passive voice; "BE + to infinitive" = necessatative/obligative mood. Similarly with HAVE: "HAVE + past participle" = perfected; "HAVE + to infinitive" = necessatative/obligative mood. BE and HAVE, in addition to their functions as aspectual, vocal, or perfecting auxiliaries, also represent non-auxiliary verbs representing such things as existence and possession when not followed by a subordinate. DO along with its usage as a verb of performance, may represent only a single auxiliary role, that of aspectual auxiliary when there is no need to focus on duration.
Just as auxiliaries may be classified by their function (modal, aspectual, perfecting, vocal), they may also be organised by their structure (single verbs with one form like may or can; versatile single form verbs like do, have, or be; phrases made up of a verb + an adjective be+willing, be+able, be+going, have+better, etc; an so on. A third classification is by strength. Some auxiliaries are 'stronger' than others and while they may subordinate additional auxiliaries, they may bot themselves be subordinated (shall, will, must, etc). Others can subordinate additional auxiliaries but can also be subordinated themselves (be+going, have, be, etc). Others still can be subordinated yet themselves cannot subordinate another auxiliary and are called 'weak auxiliaries'. The English aspectual auxiliary DO is an even further very weak type of auxiliary that is not only incapable of subordinating other auxiliaries, but in fact is displaced when it is itself subordinated, giving the appearance of it disappearing in the presence of any other auxiliary verbs.
As I've pointed out, auxiliaries alone have little value. They require a combination of auxiliary + subordinate to convey their purpose. Speakers of a language intuitively analyze for both elements as well as the various other restrictions on form and word order and such that go with them. Sometimes, when enough other clues give away such meaning or function, speakers may for matters of ease or expediency leave one or more parts out of the mix. We see this with contractions such as "I have eaten" yielding "I've eaten" or the less clearly obvious "He's..." which requires context or further grammatical components to decipher its represented form ("he's here -> he is here" = is as main verb; "he's leaving -> he is leaving" = is as aspectual auxiliary; "he's there -> he is there (now) / he was there (then)" = requires context; "he's seen -> he is seen / he was seen / he has seen" = present or past tense passive voice, or present tense perfecting auxiliary). Sometimes this creates forms where entire normally required chunks are left out as in "He (has) done it" or George Bush's infamous "(I'm) not gonna do it." Be it through context or otherwise, when speakers get the chance to express a more complex idea via a seemingly less complex form, they generally do; that's a basic tenet of language change. Sometimes however this results in mistaken analyses where speakers hear one thing and then conflate it with something that sounds or looks similar but has a different meaning or function. This is the root of your "Have you any bananas?" construction. "I do have bananas" becomes "I (do) have bananas" and further "I have bananas". Speakers intuitively know that when forming questions the subject and right-most auxiliary verb trade positions ("He (does) have bananas" becomes "Does he have bananas?") -- similar movement takes place with negation. Having more expediently taken the Do out of "I have bananas" and being quite familiar with moving HAVE around in the many common constructions in which it acts as perfecting auxiliary ("You have seen them" -> "Have you seen them?" and "You have not seen them" -> "You haven't seen them" or -> "You've not seen them"), changes in form for constructions in which HAVE were used as an auxiliary were mistakenly applied to constructions in which HAVE were used as the main verb ("You (do) have bananas." -> "You have bananas." -> "Have you bananas?" -> "I haven't..."). Things like this happen all the time, and it's not necessarily a bad thing although such changes rarely become universal or standard or stand the tests of time, even though speakers generally have no active awareness of what's happening with the language or why they chose one form over another.
DO represents one of the few situations in English in which this sort of linguistic shorthand not only took hold but quickly became a universal attribute of the language, so much so in fact that barely anyone retained awareness of there being something going on. As English moved away from its strictly declined roots and toward one that relied more on word order, the job of subject-verb agreement was given to the right-most auxiliary verb (that auxiliary closest to the subject itself). This auxiliary was tasked with handling agreement for person and number and eventually through its praeterite form, past tense or subjunctive mood. Depending on the auxiliary, some or all of these functions may be confined to a few or even single form. In regard to the aspectual auxiliary BE, such changes appear as (am, is, are, was, and were). For the perfecting auxiliary HAVE you get (have, has, and had). Other auxiliaries may yield things like (can/could, will/would, may/might) while others may show no change at all as with MUST. Because DO is that weakest of auxiliary and is so easily taken out of play without losing the neutral aspect quality of its auxiliary use, speakers easily and naturally developed a system through which they could leave out the auxiliary itself while 'inflecting' its forms into the main verb. Because they have to maintain the person/number agreement and tense expression handled by DO, the solution was to put the main verb into the equivalent old-style declined form which would have matched the form of DO to be omitted. This zero ending DO+verb became verb, while 3rd sing ending DOes + verb became verbS, and past marking DID+verb became verbED (and likewise for irregular verbs). Now of course the world of English speakers didn't sit down together and actively decide to do this, but this system did develop (as such things naturally do in languages) and the result was an abbreviated system so intuitive and easy that natives never even notice it's happening (while non-natives beat their heads against the wall trying to figure out what's going on).
This more efficient linguistic shorthand version of DO+verb however was limited. It's expediency only worked in situations where an auxiliary verb wasn't needed as part of the syntactic requirements of a grammatical construction. Because questions are formed by swapping the positions of the subject and auxiliary, and the negative marker not has to be placed immediately after the auxiliary, leaving the aspectual auxiliary DO out in these types of sentences is simply not an option. Thus the otherwise expedient omission or DO while appending its ending onto the main verb, was limited to only those constructions that did not require such movement. Because DO being such a weak auxiliary, is displaced by all other auxiliaries, including modal auxiliaries which are the most common manner of expressing future tense, this meant that this specialised shortcut was even further limited to only affirmative statements in the past tense or unmarked for tense (usually present tense). With the emphatic mood in English expressed by adding stress to whatever the target unit within a construction is, this meant that even in some otherwise acceptable past and unmarked affirmative statements, that DO had to be retained in original form ("I DID wash the car!" versus "I WASHED the car!" or "I washed THE CAR!" in contrast to nonemphatic "I did wash the car." which could just as well be "I washed the car.").
Without the required knowledge or understanding to comprehend what was going on with DO, and realising that its appearance was not consistent with similar auxiliaries which were fully regular, instead of trying to explain the disappearance of do (which being limited to only a certain set of constructions and thus being among the most rare situations in the entire language), they instead failed to recognise this and attempted to explain why DO suddenly seemed to APPEAR in all other situations. The resulting theory was do-support and further the erroneous classification of DO as having to roles, "dummy verb" and "emphatic auxiliary". Even back then, they knew that these ideas required ignoring everything else that was going on in the verbal syntax of the language and even that it required the development of a specialised set of rules of syntax that only applied to English (sometimes) and not universally which even at this early period ran counter to accepted practice. As is the tradition within the ESL and language education publishing industries, one person put their ideas out there, then the next copied them, the next copied them, and so on. And today here we are...
There has never once been a source that has provided proof that these ideas work, nor linguistic research justifying them. In fact, every source listed above and in the article could be said to fail WP's policy on references because, since they are basically secondary sources which no matter how far back you go, never lead to a primary source that proves the concept, are really little more than primary sources themselves and as has been pointed out to me several times in regard to linguistics debates on here, primary sources do not suffice. This idea has been around for about at least probably a hundred years now. If it's actually correct and viable and a part of English grammar, why has nobody managed in that time to actually provide any proof or linguistic justification for it? Everything I've written above is well-explained, clear, and once you know what you're dealing with, quite obvious. Everything regarding do-support on the other hand is based on putting your faith in an idea that cannot be proven and is based on false understanding while choosing to ignore all the easily discernible research out there that disproves it (is this the linguistic version of organised religion?). So what's it going to be?Drew.ward (talk) 19:50, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Origin of do-support?

Hello,

Is there any interest in adding a section on the origin of this phenomenon (that is, how and why English developed this unique characteristic)? I'd think supplementing the informative but straightforward current desciption of do-support with a bit about the historical linguistic circumstances that led to its development would improve the article. Any thoughts? NORTHUMBRIAN SPRǢC 04:48, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

A few sources we might use for an origin section. I'll look them over and perhaps work on an origin addition this weekend, if no one objects. Cheers, NORTHUMBRIAN SPRǢC 15:32, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Draft started

I've started a draft of the Origin section here using the references above. It's very rough at the momentl I hope to continue polishing it over the next few days. Anybody else interested is free to work on it too. NORTHUMBRIAN SPRǢC 22:43, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Who should we trust?

Two users (or at least, users editing from two different IP addresses) have removed or changed the example sentence Who did Jean flirt with? Although neither left an edit summary, I presume that each believes that only whom (not who) may serve as the object of a preposition in English. Although a few usage commentators insist on a "whom for objects" rule (e.g. Grammar Girl, various style guides), most (e.g. Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, et alia) do not. MWDEU notes that objective who has been in use since Shakespeare.

The Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style does offer some guidance on grammar, but who versus whom is not part of that guidance. Anyone who believes strongly that this usage is unacceptable should probably argue the case at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style, and be prepared to cite reliable sources for arguments in either direction. Such editors may also want to review this archived discussion.

Come to think of it, though, since this is an example sentence, and since English speakers actually do say the sentence in either of the two ways indicated on this page, such MOS arguments wouldn't really come into it. Cnilep (talk) 07:18, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure the intent of the previous unsigned edits but regardless of whether it's common or whether linguists argue for its acceptance or not, whom and not who as object is standard English and is the only grammatically correct option. Obviously quite a few speakers use who for all forms and for them whom (while known to be the prescriptive form and certainly understood) is not common usage. There are other articles in which the who vs whom dispute is constantly discussed, but seeing as this article is on the theory of do-support, this is not the place to make changes or have discussions over which to push as the norm. Whom is the grammatically correct form, so even if for many editors who is more common, the correct form should be the one used because doing otherwise risks detracting from the value of the given example in regard to the topic at hand (this goofy erroneous idea of do-support).Drew.ward (talk) 00:23, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

So to summarize, on one side of the debate we have Grammar Girl and Drew.ward. On the other side we have Strunk and White, Fowler, MWDEU, Shakespeare, Ursula K. Le Guin, The New Yorker, Willa Cather, and the British Parliament (see below), among others.
I note Drew.ward's suggestions above that experts, not the usage of English speakers and writers, determine what is Standard English, but I strongly disagree.
Cnilep (talk) 01:40, 17 June 2012 (UTC)
"I note Drew.ward's suggestions above that experts, not the usage of English speakers and writers, determine what is Standard English"
ummm...where exactly did I say that??Drew.ward (talk) 16:28, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
You didn't say that. You wrote, "regardless of whether it's common or whether linguists argue for its acceptance or not, whom and not who as object is standard English and is the only grammatically correct option", which is simply untrue. Who as object is also standard English and is also grammatically correct. Angr (talk) 19:35, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

This is the wrong place to have this argument. I have replaced the original example with another one that illustrates the same point just as well, without unnecessarily provoking the peevers. Shout out to all my whomies. CapnPrep (talk) 18:33, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

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