✐ ✐ “60-2-runfile” — 2015/9/22 — 12:12 — page 1001 — #1 ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 60(2): xxx–yyy, 2015 Parameters for unexpected (and expected) meanings: Auxiliary do in affirmative contexts GRAHAM RANGER Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse. EA 4277 1. I NTRODUCTION In the present article, I would like to look at a small subcategory of uses of the auxiliary do, in affirmative sentences of the general form Subject + do + Predicate, as illustrated by the following examples. 1 (1) A: Don’t like him, do you? [. . . ] What’s he done to you? B: Nothing. And you’re wrong. I do like him, I think he’s charming. (GVP) (2) The chances of finding a male tortoiseshell have been calculated at about 200 to 1. They may be extremely rare but they do exist. (BMG) Such cases fit in with the theme of this volume on two counts. Firstly, “emphatic” do — as it is often misleadingly called — is frequently associated with contexts in which the predication may be seen as contrary to expectation and hence unexpected. Secondly, within the verbal paradigm, this use of do is something of a grammatical surprise, a superfluous extra, since, unlike its uses in negative or interrogative envi- ronments, there is little independent structural motivation for such a construction. My aim in what follows is twofold: a. To show that emphatic do is in fact not always emphatic — prosodically — and that descriptions of its meaning in terms of some form of opposition are invariably overspecific and hence incomplete. b. To provide an abstract metalinguistic representation for this use of do which may be parameterized in a principled manner to provide a range of possible values in context. This representation needs of course to be sufficiently open- ended to account for other uses of the auxiliary, even though these will not be the object of the present paper. 1 Unless otherwise indicated, all examples are taken from the British National Corpus material, accessed at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/. The precise text is indicated by a bracketed reference after the example. All translations are mine.