lew@ihuxr.UUCP (07/20/83)
The July Scientific American has an article titled "Creole Languages". These are languages which emerge from linguistically chaotic societies such as isolated labor camps where the laborers are drawn from many different linguistic backgrounds. The authors argue that the many different and independently developed Creole languages all have an essentially identical structure which differs significantly from more formal languages such as English, French, Spanish, and so on. They infer that this is a reflection of a "natural structure" to human language. I'm sure this is a controversial thesis, but I'd like to comment on one feature that the authors mention. This is the prevalence of double negatives in the Creole languages. Years ago I read "A Guide to American English" by L. M. Myers. I was generally pleased with his linguistically liberal philosophy, but when he stated that it was absurd to insist that "I didn't do nothing." REALLY means "I did do something.", I balked. The interpretation of English as a logical system was so inculcated in me that I was incapable of admitting the legitimacy of such expressions. More recently, 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
gary@rochester.UUCP (07/25/83)
My Psycholinguistics text said that children all over the world use double (or more) negatives at a certain stage of learning language, and that in many languages, extra negatives are an acceptable form of emphasizing a negative (Black English, for example). gary cottrell (allegra or seismo)!rochester!gary or gary@rochester
donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (08/04/83)
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@nprdcdave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (08/05/83)
Well, Donn, what about Portuguese? It requires the double negative
like Italian, but unlike your example it requires it whether the
pronoun is at the beginning or not:
Maria nao viu ninguem
Mary ^ saw nobody
Ninguem nao falou com Sergio
Nobody ^ spoke with Sergio
I agree that the use of the double negative in certain contexts carries
an intuitive (if not logical) negative value. Interestingly, Hebrew, which
is totally of different origin than the Indo-European languages, uses
the double negative (it must have it) with word such as "nothing", "no-one",
etc.:
Lo ra'iti clum (No I-saw nothing --> I didn't see anything)
Af echad lo haya po (<not?> one not was here --> No-one was here)
Af pa'am lo nafalti (<not?> time no I-fell --> I never fell)
Arguably, the word for "nothing" in such languages does not mean the
same as "nothing" in English. It requires a negative verb form because
syntactically it means "something" or "someone", although semantically
it means "nothing" or "no-one". The Hebrew word "af" seems to fit this;
it can't be translated any better than "no", but it always requires a
negative verb. As can be seen from the above examples, it can be used
with "one" to mean "no-one", with "time" to mean "never". Another word,
"shum", has the same function with "thing":
Lo ra'iti shum davar (No I-saw <not?> thing -> I saw nothing)
(as far as I can determine, "shum davar" and "clum" are interchangeable
terms for "nothing" [cf. English no-one and no-body])
Dave Sherman (unfinished Linguistics major 1978)
Toronto
--
{linus,cornell,watmath,ihnp4,floyd,allegra,utzoo,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!dave