Causative/auxiliary do in Middle English and Early Modern English affirmative clauses

This thesis investigates the emergence of do-support in affirmative declarative clauses in Middle and Early Modern English. Being a syntactically obligatory feature in negative and interrogative contexts, the utilization of do in in affirmative declarative contexts followed a different trajectory commonly characterized by stylistic fluctuation, regional and genre-related variation, and syntactic shifts. By using four corpora containing text samples from Middle and Early Modern English texts, the study examines the syntactic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic factors underlying the evolution of periphrastic do. The grammaticalization process was assigned a particularly significant role when investigating the employment of affirmative declarative do in relation to the emerging syntactic phenomena such as V-to-I movement, the loss of the V2 constraint and SVO order. This thesis argues that prior to the complete grammaticalization, the utilization of affirmative declarative do sheds light on broader structural reanalysis occurred during a period of major syntactic reconfiguration in English. Based on the collected empirical evidence and theoretical insights, the study considers affirmative declarative do functioning as a ‘failed change' which may have facilitated successful syntactic innovations in the system.