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Posts tagged "negation"
“Lauren: We tend to only talk about the absence of something when it’s relevant. This is part of why negation is an additive thing to the grammar. We think about the positive version of the utterance as somehow being more default.
Gretchen: It’s actually kind of similar to how we think about numbers. Like, “one” and “two” and “three” were invented a long time before the number “zero” was invented. Even though before you have one of something, you have zero of it, but it wasn’t being commented on in a numerical way. It might’ve been being commented on in a negative way because languages do have negation, but it wasn’t being commented on as “I have zero dinosaurs.”
Lauren: Why negation is something that’s kept mathematicians and philosophers and people doing logic and linguists entertained, and many other people entertained, for such a long time and why we’re giving it its own whole episode.
Gretchen: “We’re not NOT doing a negation episode.””
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Excerpt from Episode 56 of Lingthusiasm: Not NOT a negation episode
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Lingthusiasm Episode 56: Not NOT a negation episode
“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your ways?). And yet it has a different feel to it than a more ordinary sentence like “I don’t have a cat”, the type of negated sentence that’s true for some people and not others.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about negation! We talk about how languages make sentences negative, how negation fits into the social side of conversation, and two ways you can make things super extra negative: negative concord (aka “French toast negation”) and negative polarity items (aka “Mean Girls negation”). Plus, a few sneak peeks from the upcoming book Highly Irregular by Arika Okrent, which is coming out on July 1, 2021 and which we are delighted to recommend.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
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Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Lingthusiasm Episode 11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
- Welcome to Night Vale: where even “not” isn’t what it seems - from All Things Linguistic
- Negative Morphemes on WALS
- ‘Away’ gestures associated with negative expressions in narrative discourse in Syuba (Kagate, Nepal) speakers - from Superlinguo
- Why does a nod mean ‘yes’? - from Kensy Cooperrider
- Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme―And Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent - preorder now on Amazon! (affiliate link)
- Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent - preorder now on Bookshop.org! (affiliate link)
- Negative concord has been around longer than formal logic - from All Things Linguistic
- Cycle of Negation on Wikipedia
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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
About Lingthusiasm
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
