Do not vs not do

Posted by Jamal Spelling on January 14, 2008, at 16:04:36

It always sounds wrong to me to say "do not". I think it should be "not do" instead.
For example, somebody says:
"I do not fly.".
Syntactically, my instinct is to interpret this as:
"I do <not fly>.".
<not fly> means the complement of <fly>, as in, everything different from <fly>. So, <not fly> may include <walk>, <swim>, <teleport>, <read>, <sleep>, etc.
So I interpret the sentence
"I do <not fly>."
as
"I do {<walk>, <swim>, <teleport>, <read>, <sleep>,...}.".
But of course, you don't actually do all of those things, and that's not what you mean when you say
"I do not fly.".
This ambiguity can be eliminated by saying
"I not do fly."
instead.

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Do not vs not do Jamal Spelling 1/14/08
Re: Do not vs not do » Jamal Spelling Kath 1/14/08
Re: Do not vs not do » Kath Phillipa 1/15/08
Re: Do not vs not do Sigismund 1/15/08

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