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

What it is about

Children sometimes add do to positive assertions, as in I do play or I do painting. The paper proposes that this superfluous do has two uses in child English. Auxiliary do marks Tense one-to-one with its form. Light-verb do overtly spells out the concept of action, which adults leave silent. Corpus studies on CHILDES compare child speech with child-directed speech. After agentive predicates children use do more often: agentive verbs make up 36.5% of the verbs after do in child data, against 20.7% in adult data, and statives 53.4% against 67.3%. Superfluous do is unstressed and non-emphatic. A second study finds light-verb do with gerunds more often in child speech. The analysis is mainly qualitative, supported by these counts.

Ideas

For Mova

The relevant chapters are languages/en/13-verbs.md (auxiliaries) and languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register.md (verb classes). The code is en/src/dict.rs (the lexicon of agentive and stative verbs). The measures: the agentive and stative shares after do in the pupil dialogues, with the emphatic-do control. The aim is to find which pupil sentences show the pattern, not to grade the children.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.10651

@article{martin2025what,
  title = {{What do children do with do? Superfluous do in child English}},
  author = {Martin, Fabienne and Ilic, Ivona and Schoenmakers, Gert-Jan and Alexiadou, Artemis},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.10651},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10651}
}

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