(^156) Chapter 8 Negation and related phenomena
Prescriptive grammar note
There are non-standard varieties of English - widespread in Britain, North America, and
Australasia - that use negative items in place of Standard English non-affirmative items
in clauses with verbal negation:
[22] STANDARD
a. I didn't see anybody.
ii a. He didn't say anything to anybody.
NON-STANDARD
b. !I didn't see nobody.
b. !He didn't say nothing to nobody.
The [b) examples here mark the negation in two or more places: once in the verb, and then
again in the underlined negative words. This phenomenon is called negative concord
('concord' being another term for 'agreement'): selection of nothing and nobody is deter
mined by agreement with the preceding negative.
Prescriptive manuals are right to say that the negative concord construction is not Stan
dard English. But they also commonly condemn it as illogical. It isn't. To think that
the non-standard dialects that use negative concord are illogical is to confuse logic and
grammar.
It is true that in logic two negatives cancel each other out and make a positive: It's not
the case that he didn't speak to her is true if and only if he spoke to her. And in Standard
English I didn't see nobody (with stress on nobody) implies that I did see somebody. But
that isn't what it means in the non-standard dialects: as everyone knows, there it means
that I didn't see anybody. In examples like [22ib] we have two grammatical negatives,
but only one semantic negative.
The kind of grammar that the non-standard dialects follow is also found in some stan
dard languages: in Standard French, Italian, and Polish for example. There are also collo
quial Standard English constructions that mark negation twice: Pick up some cement? Not
in my car you won 't! means "You won't pick up cement in my car", but it expresses the
negation twice; this emphatic construction is informal in style, but it isn't non-standard.
Even formal Standard English has some constructions where negation is expressed
more than once. One example is I saw neither Kim nor Pa t, where neither expresses nega
tion once and nor expresses it again - compare I didn't see either Kim or Pat, which
means the same but has only one grammatical negative.
Negative concord as in !I didn't see nobody is not illogical; it just happens to be a feature
of non-standard varieties that is absent from the standard variety. And of course Standard
English speakers know about it: when the Rolling Stones sing I can 't get no satisfaction,
everyone understands that the meaning is "I am unable to obtain satisfaction" - not "I am
unable to obtain zero satisfaction"!
5 Scope of negation
The scope of negation is the part of the sentence that the negative applies
to semantically. Scope is best understood by examination of contrasts like the one
in [23]:
[23] NEGATION HAS SCOPE OVER MANY MANY HAS SCOPE OVER NEGATION
a. Not many people believed him. b. Many people didn't believe him.
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