Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site sdchema.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn From: donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: Creole languages and double negatives Message-ID: <780@sdchema.UUCP> Date: Thu, 4-Aug-83 02:00:19 EDT Article-I.D.: sdchema.780 Posted: Thu Aug 4 02:00:19 1983 Date-Received: Thu, 4-Aug-83 23:45:54 EDT References: <512@ihuxr.UUCP> <2377@rochester.UUCP> Organization: UC San Diego Chemistry Dept. NIH Research Resource Lines: 103 These comments on "double negatives" are interesting: [R]ecently, I have tried to explain the logical interpretation of double negatives to my children, with no success. This is in line with the "Creole" authors' assertion that children readily accept the natural features of language (found in Creole), but have difficulty with "unnatural" features of formal language. I guess I've finally reached a higher level of innocence from which I can regard "I didn't do nothing" with complete equanimity. Perhaps one can regard the double negative as a syntax requiring "matching logical sense", just as the "neither ... nor" formulation. Its variance with Boolean logic needn't be a problem. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew It seems to me that this sort of data indicates that negatives don't conform strictly to the logical notion of 'not'. You might view redundant negation as being a form of emphasis, for example; one psycholinguistics text that I own remarks that: It appears that children often use multiple negatives to enphasize the negative character of what they are saying. It is interesting that the majority of the world's languages regard this use of multiple negation for emphasis as perfectly acceptable, even though English does not. [Foss & Hakes, PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, p. 258] Under this hypothesis, multiple negatives succeed only in making a clause 'more negative', rather than applying more layers of negative predicates to the interpretation. This doesn't strike me as particularly revealing, though; there is an intuitive relation between the negative marker 'not' and some other word in the sentence which is not caught by this explanation. Why do we hear 'I don't do nothing' instead of 'I don't not do something' or 'I don't not do nothing'? There is a restriction on the 'redundant' negation that goes beyond simple emphasis. What is more, there are phenomena in standard English that seem to be related to multiple negation which don't receive a common explanation under the 'emphasis' hypothesis. I'm thinking of sentence pairs like 'I did something' vs. 'I didn't do anything'; the morphemes 'some' and 'any' alternate, with 'any' often limited to 'negation' environments (notice you don't say *'I did anything'). It might be possible to maintain that 'no' is a nonstandard variant of 'any'. There has been speculation in linguistics that negation markers like 'not' are marking some kind of scope rather than simply indicating that in the logical form of the sentence there is a 'negation predicate' applied to the clause. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the subject but there are some interesting proposals that deal with this that I thought I might mention... Consider some data from Italian which are presented by Luigi Rizzi in his recent book ISSUES IN ITALIAN SYNTAX. Apparently Italian REQUIRES 'double negation' in many situations: Mario non ha visto nessuno. Mario not has seen nobody 'Mario has seen nobody.' (11a, p121) Mario non ha fatto niente. Mario not has done nothing 'Mario has done nothing.' (11b, p121) Curiously, the presence of 'non' is necessary if the negative pronoun follows but not if it precedes; for example: Nessuno ha visto Mario. Nobody has seen Mario 'Nobody has seen Mario.' (12a, p121) Con nessuno ho parlato! With nobody have-1sg spoken 'With NOBODY have I spoken!' (13, p121) In fact in the latter cases 'non' must be absent. Rizzi proposes a rule of logical interpretation which assumes that a quantified noun phrase may be bound at the position of 'non'. For certain theoretical reasons, the subject position may not contain a remotely bound variable in logical form, hence 'non' does not appear with negated subjects. If English double negation works the same way, you would expect to see that 'Mario hasn't seen nobody.' (for 'Mario hasn't seen anybody.') is okay, but not *'Nobody hasn't seen Mario.' (for 'Nobody has seen Mario.') (Well, what do you expect from modern linguistics, anyway?) At any rate I hope it is at least plausible to the gentle reader that negation markers may actually serve as indicators of quantifier scope in some situations, and that negative indefinite pronouns may be bound variables. I can produce even more complicated explanations upon request, but keep in mind that things like this helped motivate me to quit linguistics... Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn (ex-) UCSD Linguistics Dept. sdamos!donn@nprdc