7. Do, its absence, and negation

The single deepest syntactic difference between EModE and modern English is the status of the lexical verb. Modern English needs a dummy do to negate or question a lexical verb (She does not know, Does she know?). EModE could put the lexical verb itself where the auxiliary goes (She knows not, Knows she?), and could also use do where modern English cannot (She did know with no emphasis). The biblical register keeps both old patterns. This chapter shows the patterns, how often they occur in JPS 1917, and where Mova's trees go wrong.

7.1 The change in brief

Kulick, Ryant & Santorini (2022, «Parsing Early Modern English for Linguistic Search», SCiL) parse the 1.7-million-word PPCEME (1500–1712) to track the rise of auxiliary do in six sentence types. Their summary of the two endpoints:

Hejná & Walkden (2022, §4.4.1) explain the change as the loss of verb movement to the inflection position (V-to-I), which stretched from about 1400 to 1800, and the rise of do to fill that position. Their examples:

• «Looks it not like the king?» (Hamlet, c. 1600)
• «Came this out of Cobham's Quiver?» (trial of Walter Raleigh, 1600)
• «I know not by what power I am made bold» (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1595–6)
• «But I rendered not to him according to the benefit received» (Anne Bradstreet, c. 1656)

Following Ecay (2015) and Ellegård (1953), they note that do in negative declaratives rose until about 1575 and then levelled out or dipped; Warner (2005) links the dip to a stylistic dispreference for do in high-register texts after 1600. The King James Bible (1611) is exactly such a text: it prefers the old patterns.

Jespersen (1917, Negation in English and Other Languages, p. 14 of the 1917 edition) adds that some verbs kept the old negative long after the others: besides the auxiliaries, «we must here mention know, which now takes do, but was long used in the form know not, thus pretty regularly in the seventeenth and often in the eighteenth and even in the first part of the nineteenth century». He notes that later prose uses of know not, understood not imitate «Biblical usage».

Abbott (1884, §305) has the Shakespearean picture: «They, however, did not always observe the modern rule of using the auxiliary whenever not precedes the verb», with a third pattern unknown today, not before the lexical verb without do: «I not doubt» (Tempest II.1.121), «It not belongs to you» (2 Henry IV IV.1.98), «Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please» (Jonson on Shakespeare).

7.2 The patterns in JPS 1917

Counts in the 6 105 sentences (whole-phrase, case-insensitive, 2026-10-17):

So JPS 1917 has both systems side by side, as 17th-century prose did. The modern pattern is in the minority.

Affirmative do. «did eat» is not emphatic: it is the plain past («ate»). In the db, 26 of the 27 did eat are did AUX aux → eat VERB, which is right. The pragmatic layer must not read it as emphasis or contrast.

7.3 UD analysis

The rule is simple: not attaches to the verb it negates, wherever it stands. In EModE it may stand after the verb, after the subject of an inverted verb, or after the object («he knew it not»).

7.4 Where Mova's trees put not (db, 2026-10-17)

For each not in the db, I took the word before it (skipping one pronoun such as thou, ye, it, him), and counted where not is attached when that word is a lexical VERB:

(For comparison: not after an AUX, 782 cases.)

The 72 «elsewhere» cases are mostly errors. Examples from the db:

Some cases are defensible (let not the Lord be angry → not on angry negates the lower clause), but the pattern is clear: the parser has learnt from modern English that not before a word negates that word («not the sinew but the bone», «not to go»), and applies the rule to EModE, where not after the verb negates the verb.

Why it matters. prag/src/feats.rs decides polarity by looking for a negation word among the root's children (neg = "root") or anywhere (neg = "other"). A not hanging on the object makes «I know not the day of my death» a sentence with a negated object rather than a negated root: the frame «Isaac knows the day of his death» comes out positive with a negated argument. For a reader of the Torah the polarity of commandments and of statements like «he knew not» is the core of the meaning.

Fix (chapter 13, S1): a deterministic post-parse rule. If not (or never) immediately follows a finite or imperative lexical verb, or follows the subject pronoun of an inverted lexical verb, and is attached to a word to the right of it, re-attach it to the verb as advmod. Negative control: «not the sinew but the bone» has no verb before not; «I will not eat» has an AUX before not and is untouched.

7.5 Other negators

Multiple negation. EModE allowed negative concord («I cannot go no further», As You Like It II.4, often quoted; Jespersen 1917 ch. on double negation), but the biblical register does not use it. prag/src/feats.rs treats not, never, nothing, nobody, none, neither, nor, no as negators; nought, naught, nay and lest are missing (chapter 13, P1).

7.6 Questions

Inversion of the lexical verb: «Knowest thou not?», «Whither goest thou?», «Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?» (KJV Song 3:3). Inversion of an auxiliary: «Hast thou eaten?», «Art thou my very son Esau?» (jps:GEN:798). Do-questions: «Dost thou know…?» (book:pg11027:927, Grimm's Fairy Stories), «Didst thou not…?».

In UD, the subject after the verb is still nsubj; nothing else changes. The SLM gets the relations right in the examples checked (jps:EXO:277: knowest parataxis, thou nsubj, not advmod), once the verb is tagged as a verb. With knowest tagged ADJ/JJS (the SLM tags knowest → know ADJ 12 times, chapter 4), the question becomes an adjective phrase.

7.7 Summary for the parser

1. not after a lexical verb negates the verb. Re-attach it.
2. did + base verb in affirmative clauses is aux, with no emphasis.
3. A verb before its subject is still the head; the subject is nsubj.
4. Negative imperatives have no subject: «Fear not» = Fear root, Mood=Imp, not advmod.
5. Add nought, naught, nay, lest to the negation lexicon of the pragmatic layer, with lest as a negative purpose marker rather than a plain negator.

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