LL-L: "Double negative" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 17.SEP.1999 (02)

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From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Double negative

Peter Stornebrink wrote:

>>John, I can think of a triple negative which someone in the USA might use,
namely:

 "I ain't got no nottin!" (logically equivalent to "I have nothing!", since
a triple negative is equivalent to a single negative.)

Perhaps there are other triple negatives and maybe someone can even think
of a quadruple negative statement, which would be the equivalent of an
affirmative statement. I suspect that such statement would be quite clumsy.
Here is a try: "I ain't got not no nottin!"<<

Primary- (US. grade- or grammar-) school teachers will tell you that
negatives are multiplicative: -1 x -1 = 1. In real (non-academic) English
they are not, as in my earlier pentuple example.

Language is just not "logical". The late novelist and critic Marghanita
Laski had an obsession about the word "only". She argued that it could be
inserted into a sentence such as "I saw the mountain" in five different
places to give at least four different meanings - assuming as she did that
"only" qualifies the immediately following word or phrase. But English
doesn't work like that. In real E "I only saw the mountain" conveys the same
sense as the "logical" "I saw only the mountain". And logical analysis fails
entirely with the very ordinary sentence "I only saw him yesterday" = "It
was as recently as yesterday that I saw him" (but that doesn't convey all
the nuances).

John Feather
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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