“I Do Wander Everywhere” : The Rise and Fall of English Do-support

Abstract

The distribution of English do-support remains a persistent theoretical challenge, particularly regarding its prevalent use in Early Modern English affirmative declarative clauses (e.g., I do wander). While standard theories analyze do-support as a last resort mechanism triggered by blocked verb movement, this account fails to explain its high frequency in syntactically unproblematic environments during the sixteenth century. This study proposes that the subsequent decline of affirmative do was driven by the Principle of Economy: as the periphrastic construction became functionally redundant, it was eliminated in favor of the simpler morphological past. Conversely, in negative and interrogative contexts, the loss of V-to-T movement rendered do-support structurally indispensable. These findings suggest that syntactic change is best understood not as instantaneous parameter resetting, but as a gradual evolutionary process involving variation, competition, and the elimination of redundancy.