Do read, please.

A student approached me after a class and asked ”Why is it that you keep saying things like ‘Do sit down, please’ and ‘Do feel free to start talking’? What’s it with this do you keep adding there?” The student said he had never spotted this in other people’s speech, and it caught his attention as something peculiar that required explanation.

The question first took me by surprise. The fact that a student should observe something like this and then be puzzled enough to come and ask about it is not something that happens every day – or every month, even? – but when it happens, it’s always an indication of the inquisitive mind of the student for whom learning is not just fulfilling the course requirements. As any teacher will know, it is always rewarding to find that our learners are, after all, autonomous, critical, thinking creatures who will question and learn, in spite of what we try to teach them.

Secondly, the question reminded me how little we can actually trust our own intuitions and assessment about our linguistic behavior, especially when it comes to spoken language. “Do I really keep using this pattern with do so habitually?” was my first reaction. I had been caught unawares, and, had anyone asked me previously, I wouldn’t have admitted to using the structure any more than the average speaker does. (Well, yes, I did catch myself using it several times in the course of a lesson afterwards!). 

This is, however, a common finding from many studies: people have often been found to either over-report or under-report their use of standard forms of the language, for example, or  to pronounce words in a way they would swear they never do. And if you think about it, do you know how often you use certain ‘filler’ words or expressions, such as sort of or kind of, when speaking English, for instance? Or how many of us Finns can truly say whether they talk about shampoo or sampoo (or samppoo, for that matter) in their everyday usage of the word? Well, I can’t, to be honest. 

The nice thing these days is, though, that we don’t have to completely rely on people’s own intuitions only when deciding whether some word or grammatical pattern is actually OK to use, and how common it is. At least for English, there are already several large databases of authentic samples of language use by native (and non-native) speakers, both spoken and written, which can be used to check whether a word or word combination is used, how frequently it is used, and in what genres, for example. These computer corpora, some of which are accessible online for free (e.g. COCA, Corpus of Contemporary American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ and BYU-BNC, British National Corpus,  http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/) are great tools for the language learner and teacher alike.

But back to the original question: what’s it with this extra do that you put before another verb, when it doesn’t seem grammatically necessary? This so called ‘emphatic’ do can be found not only in the case of an imperative clause, as in my usage above (Do sit down, please!; Do come in! ), but also in statements like I do like your cucumber soup. As the term suggests, its main function is to emphasize. In the examples above, it serves to indicate that I truly mean what I say, and thus it may be seen as conveying a warmer and more sincere attitude. A mere I like your soup can even be interpreted as too bland and indifferent, especially when expressed with the usual Finnish intonation. 

In some cases you may need the added emphasis to contradict a prior assumption that the hearer may (or may not) have had; for example I did get it sorted out afterwards signals that you didn’t originally have very high expectations of getting it sorted out. Perhaps this is also the reason why I do like your cucumber soup sounds so much more convincing: just in case you had any doubt about it, I do like it!

-Sari  [20.9.2012]