I read a passage and there is one sentence I don't know the usage of it. The sentence is
“And did this young woman have a long memory.”
I know ‘did’ is for emphatic use, but why it can be put before “this young woman”?
Many thanks.
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Sign up to join this communityI read a passage and there is one sentence I don't know the usage of it. The sentence is
“And did this young woman have a long memory.”
I know ‘did’ is for emphatic use, but why it can be put before “this young woman”?
Many thanks.
The basic sentence here would be: - This woman had a long memory.
With the emphatic 'do', it would be: - This woman did have a long memory.
The sentence you give here is actually using the verb 'do' as an auxiliary in the question structure, as happens in the present simple and past simple:
So here the 'do' does not mark emphasis, but a question structure. The overall effect of emphasis is achieved because the question is being asked rhetorically - no answer is expected. (See for instance the following posts about rhetorical questions:
This is an exclamation.
Closed interrogatives (yes or no questions) such as:
Isn't it cold!
Is it cold!
can be used as rhetorical questions indirectly conveying exclamatory statements: the implicit meaning is close to that of the positive exclamative:
How cold it is!
Grammatically, these are interrogatives - questions, but we understand them as exclamatives because of the context, or the way they are said by the speaker (CaGEL p922-933).