Those pesky negatives (revisited)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Aug 11 01:26:59 UTC 2004


>Actually, I forgot to add the appropriate smileys. I'm not taking it as
>seriously as I may have seemed. I'm retired with nothing to do,
>basically, after I've finished changing the cats' litterbox and taken
>out the trash. So, I sometimes put more ardor into my postings than the
>situation calls for. Like, I don't have underlings to kick around
>anymore, so I have a lot of psychic energy with no way to expend it.
>
>What interests me about "to not verb" is that it seems to have come out
>of nowhere. Most of the stuff that prescriptivists rail against has
>been around for generations, if not centuries. But, AFAIK, no
>prescriptivists of the old school have included "to *not* verb" in the
>class of "split infinitives" because it simply didn't exist in their
>day. But why and how did it come into existence? What motivated it? It
>really "bugs my head," as used to be said.
>
I wonder how we can really tell that previous generations didn't
say/write "to not V"; I'd think that a proscription of split
infinitives would automatically extend to these (and to "to never V").

As to why these should occur in the first place, part of the
motivation may be (if I can describe this in arnold's presence
without making a fool of myself) the tendency to form reduced
versions of AuxV + to, which would be impossible if "not" or anything
else intervened.  (If these quasi-modals are relatively new
formations (as I suspect--arnold, can you fill in here?), this would
support Wilson's sense that the "(Aux)V not to V" is increasing in
frequency.)  Since "not to" can't reduce to "notta" in this
environment (although it can in e.g. "There's notta lotta hope for
the Sox"), the result is that we end up with a more informal
utterance in
"I'll tryDuh not do it anymore"
as opposed to
"I'll try not to do it anymore"

Similarly with "Let's tryDuh not get there before 9:00."

In the case of "wanna not" vs. "want not to" there's an orthogonal
factor, which is the availability of, and (ceteris paribus)
preference for, the neg-raised paraphrase ("don't wanna").  But cf.

"I want never to see you again"
"I wanna never see you again"
"I never wanna see you again"

The first of these strikes me as stilted/awkward or formal register;
maybe a Henry James or Jane Austen character speaking, but nobody I
know.  The second is one of our infinitive-splitters, but otherwise
natural enough.  The last is natural, but may strike some as
illogical, since the "never" really goes logically with the "seeing"
and not with the "wanting".  Now consider the sense of "want" =
'should' as used in the environment of

"You want not to turn right until the second light after the 7-11."
"You wanna not turn right until the second light after the 7-11."
"You don't wanna turn right until the second light after the 7-11."

the first again seems too high-register, the neg-raised version at
the bottom seems not to (seems to not?) carry the right sense of
"want", and the middle, infinitive-splitting one again seems fine.
One more case where neg-raising is ruled out is when the "want" is
itself negated:

He doesn't want not to eat meat, he just wants to stick to free-range chickens.
He doesn't wanna not eat meat, he just wants to stick to free-range chickens.
??He doesn't not wanna eat meat, he just wants to stick to free-range chickens.

OK, these are a bit weird, but I like the second one best.

Now consider "hafta not":

"If you're gonna cook, you really hafta not leave a big mess for me
to clean up."

(Yes, my kids are home for the summer.)  Here there's no alternative:
"have not to" is impossible, and "don't hafta" has a totally
different meaning.  This is again technically a split infinitive once
again, standardly represented as "you have to not leave a big mess".
Similarly for "You gotta not keep stepping on my foot when we dance"
(vs. *You got not to...).

larry



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