I wouldn’t say “Do not you forget about me” or “Do not you worry 'bout a thing”, but using “don’t” instead sounds acceptable to me. Is it to grammar nazis?
I think it’s probably an archaic remnant; German retains and uses this sort of thing all the time; for example ‘Listen well’ is hören Sie gut - literally ‘Listen [you] well’
“Don’t” is a standard form used to indicate the negation of a verb in an imperative sense (e.g., “Don’t walk.” “Don’t eat that.” “Don’t fear the reaper”)
And, in the imperative sentence, “you” is always understood. Thus in the sentence, “Don’t walk,” the subject is “you.”
So in “Don’t you forget about me,” the speaker is taking the understood subject “you” and saying it. It intensifies the sentence.
That’s not really a whole response, though… consider “I haven’t the time” or “won’t she be there?” Though personally I don’t see anything odd or interesting about it…
Er, the first example isn’t what I was thinking of. :smack:
Don’t is still a contraction for “do not” though, right? So “Do not you forget about me” is also correct?
Clearly “Do not forget about me” is perfectly good usage. So, most likely, this involves the rules for the use of the “you” intensifier. It seems that, in imperatives, you can use it with “don’t,” but can’t use it with “do not,” probably because “do not” is a more intense version of “don’t,” so adding “do not you” is too much of an intensifier and isn’t required in order to get the message across.
I doubt any English teacher in an Anglophone country would view “Do not you forget about me” as an acceptable variant of “don’t you forget about me.” Grammar isn’t algebra.
That’s misleading. Hoeren Sie gut is the polite form of the imperative. I think it’s much more likely to be used than the familiar form. You wouldn’t really translate hoeren Sie gut as “Listen you well”; the best translation into English would be “Listen well.”
I can think of situations in which I would use “don’t” without “you”, and some in which I’d use “don’t you”. The latter gives more emphasis, especially when, in speaking, you stress the “you”.
Remember, too, that what sounds strange may be nevertheless correct in writing. As a technical writer, I would never say “Don’t click the button”, but I might say it when I was helping someone with a problem.
In response to posts #2 & 3.
There’s something similar in American English; at least, in one dialect of American English.
Hear you me.
The last time I heard that was when I was just under 18 years old and my mother was very upset about something.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the construction “Do not you…” – it’s grammatically identical to “Don’t you…”, after all. It’s simply so little used nowadays as to be archaic and sound odd. So more of a style problem than a grammar one.
Reading Sherlock Holmes stories, one comes across its opposite: on several occasions, Holmes says to Watson, “Do you bring your revolver” (or similar). These days we would only use that construction as a question, yet for Conan Doyle it was an instruction.
One transformational grammar I am familiar with treats questions (at least y/n questions) using movement transformations. In this grammar, the movement occurs after the contraction. So the original is (something like)
you will not forget me --> you won’t forget me --> won’t you forget me
The rules involved allow only modals and auxiliary verbs to be moved in that way. Thus a sentence such as “Does he sleep” is not generated by “He sleeps” but by “He does sleep” which is more or less synonymous.
Things get complicated when the main verb of a sentence has the same form as an auxiliary verb. In general, “do” and “have” cannot be inverted in that way (exception: “Have you any wool”, doubtless an archaic form kept alive by the nursery rhyme) and “be” can be. If a verb has the form of a modal (“need”, “dare”) it is clear that the verb cannot be subject to inversion while the modal can.
I am not sure I believe this analysis, but I can’t think of a better one.
The rules of grammar aren’t different for speaking and writing. The only difference is style. "Don’t click the button is perfectly acceptable either way, it just isn’t formal and writing tends to be more formal.
Who cares what they say?
The real fact is that these “contractions” of auxiliary verbs and the negative particle “not” really do have their origin in combinations of two words. But that’s not how they work in modern English. You’ve stumbled across a key piece of evidence for that; the other relevant point is that many of these “contractions” are not actually pronounced much like the verbs they descended from. Notice that “don’t” and “do” have different vowels; “won’t” is even less similar to “will not”.
In linguistics terms, these negative forms of auxiliary verbs are called inflectional negatives; while most verbs in English don’t have separate positive and negative forms, auxiliary verbs do. That’s why the negative inflection can fit in a sentence where “not” can’t. “Don’t” can be used where “do not” can’t precisely because it’s not just some compressed form of “do not” - it’s simply the negative-inflected form of the verb “do”.
(The above is mostly based upon the explanation in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Geoffrey Pullum and Rodney Huddleston. See that work for more details.)
I’m sorry, but that’s not even remotely the case. Several people have pointed out already that it doesn’t only occur in imperative sentences. That line of reasoning just doesn’t explain the actual phenomenon.
See, and this is where the reasoning employed by traditional grammar becomes ridiculous. Not only do pedants start telling us that perfectly reasonable, very common English constructions are somehow “incorrect”, but then their reasoning leads people to decide that constructions that really are ungrammatical - ones that feel that way to all native English speakers and that English speakers don’t use - are acceptable, because it fits in with their grammatical schemes.
This is why empiricism is important; consulting people’s actual usages - that is, studying language from a perspective of evidence and logic - helps us understand what’s going on underneath. Whereas traditional grammar has already decided on a theory and must then massage the facts of actual English usage to match it. It’s very much like “creation science” in that respect - if the facts don’t match the theory, the facts are wrong!
But you can say “Do not forget about me” but not “Do not you forget about me.”
-Kris
Anyone else reading this thread have the end sequence from Breakfast Club going through their head?
This is something I didn’t realize. Very interesting; thank you.
Excalibre, I object. You’ve quoted part of my post out of context to make it seem that I’m arguing a position that I do not, in fact, hold.
My point, which I thought I made clear in my original (full) post, was that I saw no strict grammatical reason why “do not you [verb]” could not be used, but that it sounded odd to modern ears because it was an older construction that had fallen into disuse.
Far from being based on some imaginary, arbitrary, rules of grammar, my conclusion was based on the very things you advocate yourself: evidence and logic.
Logic first: the word “don’t” is a contraction of the two words “do not”, and it seems reasonable to assume that the two would be more or less interchangeable, with the former merely being less formal.
Evidence: let us, as you suggest, consult “people’s actual usages”, to see whether “do not you…” has been used in place of “don’t you…”.
Using the power of Google, I find these:
(Clement of Alexandria, “What Rich Person Will Be Saved?” xxxiii, xxxvii)
Is it common? Nope. Is it contemporary? Seemingly not. Is it colloquial? Not at all. Does that make it ungrammatical? I honestly can’t understand why it should.
You appear to be saying that “don’t” is an inflectional negative, and that “do not” isn’t, and therefore can’t fit into the sentence in the same way. And yet people have used it in that way, and presumably been understood by their readers.
What was that you were saying about “… already decided on a theory and must then massage the facts of actual English usage to match it”?
That’s the point I took you to be making. Perhaps "Do not you . . . " is grammatical in your dialect. It’s not grammatical for me; according to (again) the authors behind the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, it’s not grammatical in standard English - but then, it does happen that a particular phrasing or construction is ungrammatical for some speakers and grammatical for others. Grammaticality judgments are the basis for a lot of linguistics work, but different people disagree on what is grammatical and what isn’t.
Nevertheless, the reasoning you cited simply is not valid. The fact that “don’t” works in a sentence simply doesn’t mean that “do not” works in that place. I know because in my own idiolect and that of many other Standard English speakers, “don’t” and “do not” are indeed distributed differently.
It only works under the assumption that “don’t” is a contraction of “do not”. That describes its historical origin, but - at least for many English speakers - I’ve already shown that that’s not the case.
Ahh. See? Like I said above. The trouble is that this is based on traditional grammar, not on modern grammar. You’re starting to reason from a false assumption. In fact, it’s an interesting question that the OP raised precisely because it shows that “do not” and “don’t” aren’t syntactically equivalent.
You can tell your reasoning is flawed because it leads to an erroneous conclusion. "Do not you . . . " is not grammatical in modern English, at least not for most of us. That’s precisely what the OP was asking about. When your reasoning leads you to conclude that something is grammatical when it actually isn’t, that should be a clue to you that your reasoning isn’t working. That’s precisely what I complained about with regard to traditional grammar - when you use abstract reasoning rather than evidence to guide your conclusions, you decide that, say, “It’s me!” is ungrammatical - when anyone who gathers evidence with regard to English usage can see that it clearly is perfectly acceptable to English speakers.
Likewise, your explanation predicts that "Do not you . . . " will be in usage, and you propose no explanation beyond, basically, “it’s fallen into disuse” to explain why it’s not actually used. My explanation (again, I don’t mean to take credit - I cribbed it from people much, much smarter than me) actually explains the phenomenon in question.
It appears that you’re clinging to the fact that it used to be grammatical in forming your grammatical theory. Languages change; the fact that you had to resort to something other than current usage is pretty solid evidence in itself that your suggestion doesn’t describe current usage.