Lingua Franca         October 10, 1998
 
 

Giving Up on Double Negation
 
 

          Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: grammarian Geoff Pullum,
          giving up on double negation.

          Last week we heard from Geoff Pullum, author of The Great Eskimo
          Vocabulary Hoax, about his discovery of an indigenous preposition in the
          Brisbane Botanical Gardens. A former rock musician (he played keyboard in a
          British soul group called the Ram Jam Band in the '60s) Geoff Pullum is
          Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For the
          last few years, he's been spending his northern hemisphere summer
          vacations in Brisbane, working with fellow linguist and co-author Rodney
          Huddleston on The Cambridge Grammar of English.

          Recently, it was the chapter on negation. So here's Geoff Pullum to
          accentuate the positive in double negation.

          Geoff Pullum: One of the things I've decided as I've worked ten hours a day
          for the past six weeks on the chapter about negation for The Cambridge
          Grammar of English is that nobody knows what the term 'double negation' is
          supposed to refer to. I'm going to abandon the term. I have actually found it
          in use for ten different grammatical phenomena. But one fairly sensible use
          of the term turned up in a delightful film I saw in one of my periods off from
          the grammar treadmill, 'Sliding Doors'.

          When the John Hannah character meets the Gwyneth Paltrow character again
          after some weeks of unexplained lack of romantic communication, he
          stammers out, 'I haven't not called you. Well I shouldn't say I haven't not
          called you, because that's a double negative, and it would mean that I have
          called you. What I mean is that - I didn't call you; but I didn't not call you
          the way you probably think I didn't call you.'

          Now he's got a lot of that right: there are two negatives in 'I haven't not
          called you'. They could cancel each other out if the sentence were taken very
          literally, so by saying 'I haven't not called you', without any qualification, he
          could be taken as committing himself to the falsity of 'I haven't called you',
          which would mean that he's committed to the truth of 'I have called you'. And
          he realises that he wants to say something that isn't equivalent to that. (Are
          you with me so far?)

          It's easy enough to put together what he does want to say, too. Not calling
          someone isn't just an absence of an action, it's a way in which you can hurt
          or insult someone. It's a cruel thing you can do to someone, and he wanted
          to deny that he'd been doing that. He called the withholding of telephone
          calls 'not calling', so he said, 'I haven't not called you,' in the sense 'I haven't
          been withholding phone contact.'

          Well seeing John Hannah acting so anxious and flustered, and yet analytical
          at the same time, is one of dozens of lovely moments in the film. And his
          analysis is pretty close to being right. The only thing that's not right is the
          implication that two negatives are always bound to be equivalent to a
          positive. A lot of books say that. But two negatives are not always equivalent
          to a positive in English. In fact it's quite difficult to find a case in which they
          really are.

          When you say something like, 'We can't not go, they're expecting us', you're
          using two negatives, but one of them is negating the bit about whether we
          can, and the other is negating the bit about going, and the 'can' is in
          between them. It's really saying, 'It's not possible for us not to go'. That isn't
          at all the same thing as saying that it's possible for us to; it's actually the
          same as saying that we must go.

          So one of the things you have to watch out for is that the two negatives
          might be negating the content of two quite different clauses or phrases, and
          getting rid of them might leave something that isn't even similar to what the
          original said.

          One of the people who failed utterly to grasp this was George Orwell, the
          author of 'Animal Farm' and '1984', who wrote a celebrated diatribe called
          'Politics and the English Language', attacking late 1940s trends in English
          usage. He developed a bee in his bonnet about people saying things like 'a
          not unjustifiable assumption'. He called it 'debased', and urged that we try
          and laugh it out of existence. He recommended that in order to cure
          ourselves of using this form of words, we should try repeating to ourselves 'A
          not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.'

          But come on, I'm all for ridicule of bad writing, but this completely misses the
          mark. Orwell is apparently suggesting that there is a sort of writer who would
          use this rather than 'A black dog was chasing a small rabbit across a green
          field', but he is being completely unfair. Never mind the occurrences of 'not',
          just ask about the adjectives: do we ever use 'unblack', 'unsmall', or
          'ungreen'? No, we don't. And I'll tell you why.

          We never use 'un-' on the front of colour or size adjectives anyway; we hardly
          ever use it on any of our one-syllable high-frequency short adjectives
          ('undead' is an exception, but that was invented by Bram Stoker in 'Dracula'
          precisely to sound weird.) We use it on complex adjectives (that's adjectives
          with a prefix or a suffix or two), especially those that express subjective
          judgements about positive qualities. So we get words like 'unattractive',
          'unwelcome', 'unfortunate', 'unimaginable', and we also use it on passive
          participles: 'unparalleled', 'unwarranted', 'unbridled', and so on. Orwell's
          example uses completely nonexistent adjectives, so it's irrelevant to his
          argument. Besides he uses the 'not un-' device three times in one short
          clause; small wonder if it sounds a bit repetitive to do that.

          There is nothing wrong with phrases like 'a not unjustifiable assumption', and
          if Orwell is trying to suggest that everyone who thinks they want to say that
          should say 'a justifiable assumption' instead, he's a fool, and he's missing an
          aspect of meaning that cannot even be said to be subtle.

          Is there any speaker of English who cannot see that if I call Gwyneth Paltrow
          'a not unattractive woman', it's a distinctly feeble and grudging compliment
          compared with calling her 'an attractive woman'? Let's consider why there's
          such a big difference: the word 'attractive' is used to make the claim that
          something or someone falls in the upper ranges of a scale of beauty or
          desirability. The opposite, 'unattractive', is used to place things or people at
          the low end of that scale. Now, to say 'not unattractive' is to assign a
          description that merely rules out the low end. That leaves everything from
          about 45% attractive up to 100% attractive. But surely someone who uses a
          phrase compatible with the whole of that range doesn't mean 100% on the
          old attractiveness meter, or even 90%, because in that case they could have
          said 'attractive'. So 'not unattractive' is a locution that offers a modest
          compliment, without coming right out and making explicit the fact that high
          praise is not appropriate. It's a euphemism, or a tactful backing-off. If that's
          too subtle for Orwell, then he's not fit to be writing an essay purporting to
          tell the rest of us how to write.

          However, Orwell's hostility to the not unjustifiable construction I've just
          mentioned, pales into insignificance beside the hostility that well-educated
          speakers of English feel toward a completely different phenomenon also
          called double negation, and that's the kind of negation illustrated in Cockney,
          by 'I didn't see nuffink'. This, educated people think, is mere ignorance.
          Anyone with a logical bone in their head should be able to see, they
          maintain, that if you did not see nothing, then that means you did see
          something. If you claim that you didn't see nothing when you mean that you
          did see nothing, you are ignorant and unworthy and should be sent back to
          whatever awful school was responsible for the teaching you clearly didn't get.

          Well, this is a thoroughly misdiagnosed situation. Let me explain how a
          linguist looks at the phenomenon in question. There is in fact only one
          negation in 'I didn't see nuffink', as used by Cockneys or working-class
          Australians or black Americans or anyone else who uses this device. It's the
          negative of 'I saw somefink', and what differentiates Cockney from Standard
          English has been entirely misidentified by calling it double negation. Here it
          is, somewhat over-simplified: Standard English has three separate versions of
          the item whose positive version is 'something'. I am referring to the words
          'something', 'nothing', and 'anything'. The first of these, 'something', is used
          in positive contexts, as in 'I saw something'; the second, 'nothing', is used to
          create negative clauses, as in 'I saw nothing'; and the third is used nearly
          everywhere else: in negative clauses like 'I didn't see anything', in
          conditional clauses like 'If I saw anything', in questions, like 'Did you see
          anything?' and various other contexts. Cockney differs in one simple respect:
          the second and third versions are not distinguished. It's as if we had a
          language that was just like English but with 'anything' and 'nothing'
          pronounced the same. That's all that's going on.

          The mistake is in seeing a mistake. This kind of usage is not a mistake. It's a
          form of words that is characteristic of many languages, including Spanish,
          Italian, Polish, Russian and Cockney, but not Standard English. Linguists call
          it Negative Concord.

          The Cambridge Grammar of English, I have decided, is not going to hush this
          up with a blush and a mumble and pass on as if embarrassed. It's going to
          great it seriously. It's going to explain, of course, that Negative Concord is
          not used in formal writing and should be avoided in all contexts where
          keeping up appearances is an issue. But it is also going to explain how
          Negative Concord works, which is something like this: Everywhere you would
          get an 'any' word, like 'anything', 'anyone', 'anybody, 'anywhere', 'any', or the
          indefinite article 'a', Negative Concord languages require that you use the
          appropriate 'no' word instead. It doesn't matter how many there are in the
          sentence, this applies to all of them. So if you take 'I don't want a linguist
          with a grammar book giving me any lectures about a proper way to speak to
          anybody', it comes out in Cockney or in a Negative Concord language, as 'I
          don't want no linguist with no grammar book giving me no lectures about no
          proper way to speak to nobody'. That's not a sextuple negation, it's an
          ordinary single negation. But there are five indefinite words like 'a' and
          'anybody' in there, and they all get pronounced in Cockney the same as the
          negative words 'no' and 'nobody'.

          You have to learn this if you're going to make any claim to knowing English.
          Because if you believe that when the Rolling Stones play 'Satisfaction' and
          Mick Jagger sings 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' he is singing about how it is
          impossible for him not to be satisfied, you can't even understand rock 'n' roll.
          A fully competent speaker of English knows how to work out the meaning of
          both 'I am unable to obtain any satisfaction' and 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction',
          and knows that the first of those would be suitable in a business letter and
          the second would be appropriate in personal conversation in a pub in
          Spitalfields or Pentonville. A person who cannot understand Mick Jagger's
          lyrics, even if they are written out on a sheet of paper (nobody can
          understand much of it when he's singing, of course, is not a better English
          speaker, but a worse one.

          The way I see it, real class in being an English speaker involves
          understanding both the Queen saying, 'My husband and I cannot imagine
          anything nicer', and a Cockney speaker saying, 'Me old man and me can't fink
          of nuffink nicer'. Real class is being knowledgeable about the diversity of
          English as well as sensitive to the nuances of the different varieties. The
          status-obsessed grumblers who complain about other people's double
          negations do not have class. There is nothing classy about insensitivity to
          the complexity of the linguistic world around us. If you pay attention to
          linguistic diversity and appreciate the variety in your language, you'll find you
          can't get no satisfaction.

          Jill Kitson: Geoff Pullum, Professor of Linguistics at the University of
          California, Santa Cruz, who with Professor Rodney Huddleston is writing The
          Cambridge Grammar of English. His book, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,
          is published by University of Chicago Press.

          And Geoff will be back next week on Lingua Franca to talk about why ebonics
          is no joke.

          'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' - Rolling Stones