Nobody Does It Like Sara Lee?

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:55 PM -0700 4/18/05, Allen Maberry wrote:
>I could say "everybody dislikes something" but I don't believe I
>would ever say, "everybody doesn't like something", or "nobody
>doesn't like X [Sara Lee, apple pie, mom, etc.]" but I could say
>"nobody dislikes X". I don't have any explanation why that is,
>unless there is something about inserting "does/doesn't" that makes
>it sound strange to me when used in these phrases.

I don't think it's the "does" that does it, since the same would
apply in non-do-support contexts (cf. "Everybody isn't here",
"Everyone can't come").

Besides the garden path factor I mentioned earlier (the fact that
"everybody doesn't like X" tends to be interpreted, all things being
equal, as "not everybody likes X", while this reading is ruled out
when negation is incorporated into the predicate as in "dislikes"),
there's the fact that the two readings of the awkward ambiguous
"Every...not..." statement each has an unambiguous paraphrase that
tends for this reason to be preferred:  "not everybody likes X" for
the wide scope, [NOT [EVERY]] negation and "nobody likes X" for the
narrow scope negation, [EVERY [NOT]].  While "Everybody dislikes X"
isn't quite a paraphrase of the latter, since it amounts to a
stronger, contrary negation rather than a simple contradictory of
"Somebody likes X"*, it does unambiguously have narrow-scope negation
and thus doesn't suffer from one fatal flaw of "Everybody doesn't
like X".

A possible paraphrase of the full Sara Lee ditty which doesn't suffer
from the ambiguity flaw is "Everybody has something they don't like
(...but for nobody is that something Sara Lee)".  I guess it has
other flaws, though.

larry

*disliking is stronger than simply not-liking, so that "Nobody likes
X" can be true while "Everybody dislikes X" is false, namely if
nobody has a favorable opinion toward X while some people just feel
sort of wishy-washy about X.  The former amounts essentially to the
non-existent "Everybody not-likes X".