Periphrastic DO in South-Western Dialects of British English: A Reassessment

In the discussion which follows, the term 'periphrastic DO' will be employed to refer to the use of DO as an unstressed tense marker in affirmative statements. In contrast to emphatic DO, periphrastic DO is always unstressed, and realized phonetically as [do] or [d] rather than [du:], and [di] or [d] rather than [did] in the present and the past tenses respectively. As Ihalainen (1976: 609) has noted, the emphatic and periphrastic uses also behave differently with respect to certain frequency adverbs: in emphatic uses the adverb precedes the auxiliary DO, whereas in periphrastic uses the adverb follows the auxiliary. Examples (5) and (6) from Ihalainen (1976: 609) illustrate this difference: