Timeline for "would not" vs. "did not"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 11, 2016 at 10:03 | comment | added | user230 | Treating -n't as an inflectional affix goes back to this 1988 paper by Zwicky and Pullum: web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf | |
| Feb 8, 2016 at 20:22 | history | migrated | from english.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
| Feb 6, 2016 at 18:20 | comment | added | John Clifford | Ta muchly, I'm off to give that a read. :) | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 18:19 | comment | added | BillJ | Yes, the bit about "couldn't" and "can't" (and other auxiliaries) being part of the paradigm is covered on p75, and negative inflection vs contraction is discussed on p91. They talk about "won't" but the same applies to "wouldn't", "couldn't" etc. | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 18:14 | comment | added | John Clifford | Do you know what page covers this? I'm reading it now but when I did a search for "couldn't" and "wouldn't" I didn't get any results. | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 18:12 | comment | added | BillJ | Yes, it's all good stuff! Well, I suppose you could say 'old-fashioned', but H&P star such examples up as ungrammatical. Perhaps the example "couldn't / *could not she find it?" is even more unnatural. | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 18:03 | comment | added | John Clifford | Fascinating, I'll definitely have to look into that further, thanks. Would not you agree that your latter sentence could still use "would not" albeit at the cost of sounding a bit old-fashioned? ;) | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 17:58 | comment | added | BillJ | It's the view taken by the Cambridge Grammar of The English Language (Huddleston & Pullum). Part of the evidence to support that view is that "wouldn't" is not always replaceable by "would not" (as "she'll" is by "she will"); for example in "wouldn't / *would not she be glad?" where the contraction analysis is not viable. | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 17:52 | comment | added | John Clifford | That's an interesting point of view; I've only ever seen them defined as contractions, and I've never seen a definition of apostrophe that would support it being used as an inflection. Do you have any sources that I could look at on this? | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 17:48 | comment | added | BillJ | I wouldn't call "wouldn't" a contracted form; rather part of the paradigm for the auxiliary verb "would". In other words, it's a single grammatical word, an inflectional form of "would". Same applies to "couldn't" and "can't", inflectional forms of "could" and "can" and thus part of their paradigms. | |
| Feb 6, 2016 at 11:26 | history | answered | John Clifford | CC BY-SA 3.0 |