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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>"



That's what I meant in this use of periphrastic. AHD marks this secondary meaning as a grammar usage. Do is the infinitive (or, if you prefer, the base form as Marianna likes to call it) and covers any conjugated form.


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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.



I agree with you that it is probably best we leave this subtlety alone in this thread.

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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



That's probably because you are limited to a simplistic prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammars are much more complex, having to describe language as it is actually used. Just as an example, what would you say about the nature of the verb go in the sentence He will go to the house? The German, e.g., would be Er wird zum Haus gehen where gehen is clearly an infinitive.