"so Auxn't NP" (was: Re: "until" vs "before" or "to")

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:10 PM -0400 7/21/07, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Any theory of the origin of this construction? I wonder if it could
>originally have come from exchanges like
>
>"I wish the sun would come out."
>"Don't we all?" [without rising contour]
>
I'm not sure I see the parallel.  The response in your exchange (even
without rising intonation, which in any case is often optional in
questions of various kinds--cf. "Didn't I just say that?" with
falling intonation) involves a negative question, which typically
implies a positive.*  This is a far cry from "So don't I" as a
response to the initial optative, where no question in involved, just
an apparently extraneous negative.  I always assumed some sort of
irony or sarcasm is involved in "So Auxn't NP", at least in the
earlier development, as arguably is the case with "I could care
less", "a fat lot of good that will do", "that'll teach you to...",
and even the famous "Yeah yeah" of the apocryphal story about the
double positives making a negative, but native "So Auxn't NP"
speakers insist no irony/sarcasm is involved.

LH

*Thus compare

(1) He's a real genius.
(2) He isn't a real genius.
(3) Is he a real genius?
(4) Isn't he a real genius(?)

--an ironic/sarcastic interpretation is natural, if not preferred,
for (1) and (4), but vanishingly hard to get in (2) and (3).

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