I'm not not saying you shouldn't not read this . . .

It's been some time since I've posted something here, but Dr. K (in her usual style) pointed me towards this recent article on words of negation that I'm guessing HEL folk will find very interesting.  What bothers some of us about statements such as "He don't do nothin' all day long" is based on the prescriptivist grammarian's logic about how negative words cancel each other out.  However, this article demonstrates that the history of most languages indicate that words of negation emerge as expressions of emphasis.  In other words, when we hear someone say "He don't do nothin' all day long," we all know that the speaker means emphatically that "He doesn't do anything all day long."  Only the literalists among us would assume that the speaker was just being clever with words of negation.


Students of Chaucer (and yes, I'm talking to you all in ENG 381!) will recognize the preponderance of such emphatic negations from the descriptions of the pilgrims in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  Chaucer describes the Friar by saying, "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" ("There never was no man nowhere so virtuous") and the Knight by claiming "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight" ("He never yet no vileness didn't say / In all his life no manner of man.").  We don't need to count the number of negatives to guess that Chaucer is characterizing both as virtuous men (although, we know from the rest of his description of the Friar that this assessment is suspect).


I'm curious to know, however, if such superfluous negatives or other words noted in the article such as "literally" bother us.  My father used to get after me for asking "Where are you at?"  What he didn't know was that I was just using "at" for emphasis.  Okay, I may not have been not un-conscious of that at the time . . .