Project description
Exploring English do-support origins
Do-support, or do-insertion, is a defining feature of modern English grammar, used to form negations and questions. Interestingly, a similar construction appears in Camuno, a Romance dialect, offering parallels with historical English usage from 1400 to 1550. With support from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SEEDS project will explore the emergence of do-support in English through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together linguistic theory and historical analysis. The project will investigate how semantically compositional expressions evolved into idiomatic grammatical structures, examining historical texts to trace the meanings, syntactic patterns, and lexical roles of ‘do’ in early English. This research will shed new light on broader mechanisms of language change and grammaticalisation.
Objective
This project will tackle an old and much debated topic in historical English: the origin of English do-support (DS). The new approach is within an interdisciplinary framework of language change and grammaticalisation, and views language as composed of constructions, the process driven by the pragmatics. The focus is the tipping point between the construction as semantically compositional, and the later stages where it is predominantly idiomatic. This research is underpinned by widespread evidence that grammaticalisation pathways for auxiliary verbs are often very similar cross-linguistically (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994). It is specifically informed by a recent study of a ‘do’-support construction in a different language, the living Romance dialect of Camuno (the researcher’s PhD topic: Swinburne 2021), perhaps currently the only example of DS other than English with sufficient data to indicate a grammaticalisation pathway. There are certain similarities between the more primitive forms of DS in modern Camuno and in (south)-western dialects of historical English (1400-1550). These are: 1) semantic preferences in the type of infinitival verb (activity > stative verb) and subject thematic role (agent > experiencer); 2) expression of reality, certainty and existence (in comparison to both main verb-only and modal sentences); 3) an intensifying meaning employed to express doubt or confirmation of a speaker’s prior expectation (so in this sense its use is ‘presuppositional). Through detailed analysis of certain historical texts, the project explores the meanings and functions of early DS in this period; how these meanings may be predetermined by the lexical meaning of ‘do’; and the extent to which syntax played a part in the early developments.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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79098 Freiburg
Germany
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