What makes a syntactic change stop? On the decline of periphrastic do in Early Modern English affirmative declarative sentences

Abstract

In Early Modern English, from about 1500 onwards, the periphrastic do-construction developed in all types of sentences, including affirmative declarative sentences. However, in the latter this development came to a halt and the number of such constructions continually declined in the course of the 17th century. This paper pursues the question of what hidden linguistic factors might have promoted the change and why it finally failed to succeed. Therefore it examines the use of periphrastic do in affirmative declarative sentences in the Early Modern English part of the Helsinki Corpus. In order to identify possible reasons for its decline, the study first discusses the origin of periphrastic do and then concentrates on the stylistic and functional variation that existed between the use of the innovative and the conservative construction. It will be shown what particular morphological, semantic and syntactic functions do could fulfill in such periphrases and why neither of these uses was conventionalized in the language.