[Lingtyp] Temporal features?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

A little lesson in why I hate top-posting so much, with the extremely unnatural cataphora that it leads to.

  Exchanges like this one.
  
  What's the problem with top posting?

> On Oct 2, 2018, at 6:50 AM, Claire Bowern <clairebowern at gmail.com> wrote

> If I remember right, double negation of this sort [AZ: of the sort well below] has featured on Language Log in the past....

> [AZ: CB's reformulated sentence, not the original "double negation of this sort"]  It's impossible to maintain the claim that (at least for the domains we studied) hunter-gatherers share features which make them a group distinct from agriculturalists [AZ: good. That's what I was hoping you were saying.]

yes, much posted about on Language Log, under the heading of "overnegation".  it's remarkably easy to fall into.

> 
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 9:47 AM Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> Claire writes:
> 
> > Though I'm not sure we ever said this explicitly in this project, the overall impression I got from coding and analyzing all this data was that the sample of hunter-gatherers was more variable than intensive agriculturalists, but not necessarily more so than small-scale agriculturalists. [AZ: the sentence in question, the referent of "of this sort" up above] Certainly none of the claims that hunter-gatherer languages share features as a group distinct from agriculturalists is impossible to maintain.
> 
> [AZ: carefully bottom-posted, to provide easily interpretable anaphora] Could we have that last sentence again, with only one negating element in it?
> 
> Arnold