Linguistic Purism in Action

The auxiliary do (tun) is one of the most-discussed constructions in West Germanic. In German, there is a striking opposition between modern standard German, where the construction is virtually ungrammatical and considered to be "e;sub-standard"e; by most speakers, whilst, as this book shows, the construction is attested in all modern dialects as well as historic stages since 1350. In answering wh...