Use guys need to stop this.
Faldage, can you explain further what you meant? You state that the "do" is periphrastic. I assume you meant "did" as in "You did not use to play for that team." I cannot think off hand of a sentence where the present tense of do would work. Periphrastic I am guessing you are using in what most dictionaries carry as the secondary meaning:
"formed by the use of function words or auxiliaries instead of by inflection <more fair is a periphrastic comparative>"
Lets go back to the sentence "You did not use to play for that team." If I recast it to get rid of the did, I would have something like "You used to not play for that team."
I cannot put a finger on it exactly, and it may not be a good sentence to use for this discussion, but to me the second construction almost implies that though you were on the team you did not play, while the first one is more along the lines of "You changed to a new team." Perhaps not, though, and if there is a difference it is extremely subtle and might be better seen with some other sentence.
But the part I am having trouble with is where you say that the sentence with the present-tense "use" takes "use" as an infinitive without the word "to" which you state is not necessary to an infinitive. That goes against everything I ever learned in grammar; the infinitive is still the to followed by the verb that is later in the sentence.
TEd
