What do children do with do? Superfluous do in child English

Abstract

In English, superfluous do is phonologically unstressed, non-emphatic, and occurs in positive assertions. We propose that superfluous do has two different flavours in child English. First, auxiliary do is used by children to express Tense in a one-to-one relation with form. Second, children use do as a light verb to overtly express the concept of action, which is ‘compressed’ in the verbal structure and left silent in standard adult English. We report on studies on English Childes corpora showing that the Aktionsart of the verb used after do plays a role in the production of superfluous do in child English: in positive assertions, do is used before an agentive predicate (as in I do play or I do painting) more often in child speech than in child-directed speech. In the child data, superfluous do also occasionally appears after an auxiliary, which is to be expected if it behaves as a light verb. The results of the corpus studies also show that stative predicates are particularly frequent after do in positive assertions in both child and adult English, which we explain by the fact that stative predicates can have both generic and episodic uses in the present tense, whereas in the same tense, eventive predicates are much more restricted in their interpretation.