"Don't rock the boat!"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Oct 11 23:03:05 UTC 2010


On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

> And hopefully the hearer correctly interpreted this as negative
> concord rather than double negation!
>

Sadly, no. Even though Russian exhibits negative concord very much
like that of BE, I had as hard a time learning it as I would have, if
I'd never encountered the phenomenon before! And I even believe that
negative concord, in some sense, is a feature of English. Else, why
would it be necessary to expend so much effort trying to get English
speakers not to - or should that be "to not"? ;-) - apply it?

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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