Brett,

I suspect you misspoke below when you wrote "for reasons why -N'T should be considered an inflectional ending (or "clitic" in technical terms)."  The point of Zwicky&Pullum's argument is that inflectional endings and clitics aren't the same thing, and "n't" is an inflectional ending, not a clitic.  

Clitic is a useful category in grammatical analysis, although it's not easy to define.  Contrasting clitics with inflectional endings is one thing.  Defining clitics across languages or even across English is a little harder. Roughly speaking, on a scale of how bound they are and what they bind to, affixes are the most bound and words the least, hence Bloomfield's definition of "word" as a "minimal free form."  Clitics sit between affixes and words. They are bound to grammatical categories, like NP, not to roots or stems as affixes are. Unstressed words like "the," "and," prepositions, "that" as a subordinating conjunctions, etc. behave like clitics rather than words.  

While the affix/clitic/word distinction is important in grammatical analysis, I doubt that it has much of a place in teaching grammar in high school or college.

Herb  

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brett Reynolds
Sent: Saturday, July 31, 2010 7:56 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: question about negative contractions
Importance: Low

On 2010-07-28, at 3:53 PM, Tony DeFazio wrote:

> Can someone explain, please, why we can say "Why don't you like her?" but not "Why do not you like her?" A student asked and I was at a loss for an explanation. 

Zwicky & Pullum (1983) <http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf> put forth the argument that -N'T, though historically a contraction, has actually become an inflectional ending for auxiliary verbs. That is, they say it's like the past tense -ED or third person -S. This approach is followed in the recently mentioned grammars by Huddleston & Pullum. See the paper linked to above for reasons why -N'T should be considered an inflectional ending (or "clitic" in technical terms).

If -N'T is a negative inflection, and I think it is, then the reason we can say "Why don't you like her?" (or "Why can't you be there" etc.) is because the inflection simply can't be separated from the auxiliary verb. The other question, why you can't say "Why do not you like her?", is a question about adverb placement in general, not just "not". You can't say "Why do never you go there?" "Why do always you say that?" etc.

Best,
Brett

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning Toronto, Ontario, Canada [log in to unmask]

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