DOAUX DO auxiliary

Definition

DO used as auxiliary verb in questions, negation, or emphatic constructions (e.g., “Did you go?”, “I don’t know”, “I do believe”).

Detection Rules

DO with lemma “do” whose dependency role is auxiliary. Captures DO-support in questions, negation, and emphatic constructions.

cql[lemma="do" & dep="aux"]

Requires: lemma, pos, dep

mfte

MFTE uses positional heuristics: do/does/did as verb, not after/before “to”, followed by VB, punctuation, pronoun, negation+VB, WH-word before, etc. Also catches emphatic DO (do + VB). Does not use dependency parsing. MFTE excludes “to do” via a precondition; we use a span-aware excludes on _INFDO (helper feature matching “to do”).

p1
cql[word="[Dd]o|[Dd]oes|[Dd]id" & pos="VB.*"] [pos="VB"]
p2
cql[word="[Dd]o|[Dd]oes|[Dd]id" & pos="VB.*"] [pos!="[A-Z].*"]
p3
cql[word="[Dd]o|[Dd]oes|[Dd]id" & pos="VB.*"] [word="not|n.t|[Nn]ever"] [pos="VB"]
p4
cql[word="[Dd]o|[Dd]oes|[Dd]id" & pos="VB.*"] [pos="RB"] [pos="VB"]
p5
cql[word="[Dd]o|[Dd]oes|[Dd]id" & pos="VB.*"] [word="I|you|[Hh]e|[Ss]he|it|[Ww]e|[Tt]hey"]
p6
cql[word="[Dd]o|[Dd]oes|[Dd]id" & pos="VB.*"] [pos="RB"] [word="I|you|[Hh]e|[Ss]he|it|[Ww]e|[Tt]hey"]
p7
cql[word="[Dd]o|[Dd]oes|[Dd]id" & pos="VB.*"] [word="not|n.t|[Nn]ever"] [pos="RB"] [pos="VB"]
combine: (p1 | p2 | p3 | p4 | p5 | p6 | p7) & !_INFDO

Requires: word, pos

Refines: VB

Normalization

Per finite_verbs

Examples

Should take longer than it does.

Source: le_foll_2024

She needed that house, didn’t she?

Source: le_foll_2024

Who did not already love him.

Source: le_foll_2024

Sources

  • mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version

Notes

MFTE’s DOAUX counts DO as auxiliary (questions, negation, emphasis, tags). This is the COMPLEMENT of Biber’s f_12 / Xiao’s B22 “pro-verb DO” (see DOPV), which counts DO standing in for a lexical verb. Together they account for all uses of DO.