[Lexicog] On supposed "double negatives"

[Peter Kirk]

On 29/01/2005 22:07, rtroike at email.arizona.edu wrote:

>Peter,
>
>     Your recollection is certainly good. ...
>

Thank you!

>...
>
>     I've (randomly) encountered this "agreement" phenomenon in Egyptian Arabic,
>where an enclitic pronoun "-ish" (I think) has been recruited for this purpose,
>and in Burmese. The underlying psychology that would reproduce this same
>structural effect so widely may be rooted in the communicative need to make the
>negation clear to a hearer. Why the second element comes to be interpreted as
>the primary negator is mysterious.
>
>
>
Another interesting example is in Azerbaijani, another language in which
a double negative has a negative meaning. (Indeed, are there any
languages in which it does not apart from upper-class Latin and
upper-class English?) In this Turkic language negation is marked on the
verb, and can be emphasised or further specified by either a negative
adverb, pronoun etc or by a positive one. The Arabic adverb "aslaa",
meaning something like "actually" or "originally", has become commonly
used as a loan word with negative sentences with a meaning like "at all"
or "ever" in English, i.e. strengthening the negative. And, with its
original Arabic meaning forgotten, it has then been reinterpreted as a
negative word which can be used in the sense "not at all" or "never"
even when there is no negative verb associated with it. Thus the word
has come to mean precisely the opposite of what it originally meant.

--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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