This paper attempts to achieve utmost simplicity in dealing with verbal morphology in English by proposing that all tensed verbs, auxiliary or main, are inflected by raising to Infl in a uniform fashion, just like in French. This is made possible by doing away with two questionable operations in English, namely, Affix Hopping and Do-Support. Affix Hopping, Infl lowering or PF merger, yields inflection only on main verbs, but not on auxiliary verbs, which raise to Infl for their inflection. This disparity, however, does not correlate any morphological property for words like has/had and does/did although they can be formed both ways. Do-Support, inserting the dummy verb do to the stranded Infl, is quite queer in that this dummy element appears suddenly from nowhere under the name of Last Resort and further nobody knows why the supported element must particularly be do. This paper proposes that there exists a null form of the dummy auxiliary verb do, 0do, and this null verb is realized as overt do in certain environments, for example, before the sentential not in finite clauses and in an emphatic context. In other cases its overt realization as do is suppressed by Morphological Economy in the sense of Freidin 2004.
1. Introduction
2. Some problems with Affix Hopping and Do-Support
3. The sentential not is an XP adverbial
4. Null verb 0do
5. Reanalysis of the sentential not in finite clauses
6. Summary