yet this fillie doth many times assault the brauest minds: Affirmative Declarative do in 17th-Century English

Abstract

The origin and early use of periphrastic do has intrigued scholars for a considerable period of time, and it has been described as one of the great riddles of English linguistics. Numerous studies have been devoted to the topic; two early ones are Engblom 1938 and Eliegård 1953. In recent years there has been renewed interest in the use of do in earlier periods of English, and quite a few studies have approached the problem from the point of view of text linguistics and discourse analysis.