it doesn't behoove you

[Rick Barr]

Something else that may be muddying the water here is an inbuilt difficulty
with negation. Deborah J. Bennett, in her book *Logic Made Easy*, presents
some of the cognitive evidence for a deeply rooted difficulty to handle some
types of negations, especially when the word "all" lurks around in the
statement.

-- Rick


On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 12:39 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: it doesn't behoove you
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12:19 PM -0400 9/3/10, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> >Just a thought -- isn't the use of "behoove" part of a more general
> >confusion between the concepts of "not required to ..." and "required
> >not to ..."?
> >
> >Even sticking with a definition of "advantageous", saying something is
> >not advantageous doesn't mean it makes you worse off. If you say it is
> >advantageous not to do something, then you are better off not doing
> >it.
> >
> >DanG
>
> Well, the literature on neg-raising does worry about such issues,
> although generally not by regarding the strengthened meanings as
> simple confusion.  (The question would then arise as to why some
> concepts are confused and others aren't, and why some concepts are
> confused in one dialect but not in another. And when we say "I don't
> want to" are we virtually always confused about the difference
> between not-wanting and wanting-not?)
>
> Now, it's generally acknowledged that even when a the stronger,
> neg-raised reading (or as Aristotle would call it, a contrary
> reading) is available, as with "it's not advisable to go" = 'it's
> advisable not to', the weaker, literal ("contradictory") reading is
> also available, so the result is ambiguity.  Note that here as is
> often the case, the prefixal form ("it's inadvisable to go", "it's
> disadvantageous to go") removes the ambiguity and allows only the
> stronger meaning.  So saying that something is not advantageous
> (unlike "disadvantageous") can be taken either way--a denial of the
> claim that it makes you better off, or a suggestion than in fact it
> makes you worse off.  But I'd say "not required to" doesn't really
> exhibit this ambiguity.  If I tell you "You're not required to apply
> in writing", there's no specific reading "You're required not to
> apply in writing" the way there is with "it's not advantageous
> to"--or with "you're not supposed to" (where in fact it's pretty hard
> to take the negation as simply denying supposed-to-ness).  The
> question then is why does "behoove" pattern (for some) with "supposed
> to" or "be advantgeous to" rather than, as we might expect, with "be
> required to".
>
> LH

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