LL-L: "Double negative" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 17.SEP.1999 (04)

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From: Lee [glent at troi.csw.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Double negative" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 17.SEP.1999 (02)

>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.)

Hey, long time no type.  How are you all doin out there in Lowlands Land?

"I ain't got no nottin!" Sounds like New York speak to me!! Does Rocky
Balboa ring a bell! (laughs) In the South we might say something like.  "I
jes don't have nuthin aTall!" (at all)  Appalachian Richard, what do you
think, help me out here!

Dubhglas o Schweissguth

"That's dithpiccable!"--Daffy Duck

----------

From: Gerald Tighe [gftighe2 at home.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Double negative" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 16.SEP.1999 (01)

Hi Folk:

For your amusement:

No I have not not got no nothing no.
and
That that is is that that is not is not.

Punctuation: You can, of it, have too little .

--
Regards

Gerald             http://artphotoprints.com

----------

From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk]
Subject: "Double Negative"

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

A friend of mine recently criticised my use of the double negative in
Appalachian (of course, my attempts at Appalachian are always rubbish!). She
feels that in Appalachian and English alike, the double negative is simply
uneducated speech.

I think that this is a good point - there _are_ languages (Czech, for
example), where multiple negatives are _the_ way to express the negative in
a sentence, academic or otherwise, but English, Scots and (if my friend is
right) Appalachian, don't seem to be such languages. There is always
variation within a language, especially in "real" speech, but when clarity
is considered desirable (nearly always?) and semantic aids such as tone of
voice and accepted idiom are absent (true especially for written general
English or cross-cultural communication), English is a "multiplicative"
language, where Czech would be additive.

This point becomes clearer in English (I can't remember enough of my Czech
to think how it goes in that language!) when you consider various ways of
forming negatives in English, for example with use of the prefix "un-" to
say "I'm not unhappy". The two negatives in this sentence seem to me to
cancel one another without a doubt. Sentences with multiplicative negatives
abound, with no way of interpreting them as additive:

It's not unusual.
I'm not going without you.
We're not not-friends, we're just not speaking.
There's no doubt that she didn't see him.
It's not as hopeless as it seems.

Whereas attempted uses of additive negatives in English are fraught with
ambiguity:

I haven't got none.

The interpreptation of the above depends heavily on tone of voice, and
someone actually _writing_ this in English could fairly be said to have
failed to communicate their meaning. The reader can only hope that the
writer is following normal rather than stressed or idiomatic usage, and
interpret it accordingly. Changing the "haven't" to "ain't" gives a
recognisable idiom:

I ain't got none.

This would be most likely be interpreted additively, but only as idiom;
non-idiomatic uses remain multiplicative:

It ain't unusual.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org

"I ain't goin' diggin' no grave in no night with no no-headed man no-how."
- John Lee Hooker, "Graveyard Blues".

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