"If I don't get into it not wanting to win…"
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During today's episode of "Angelo Cataldi and the Morning Gang" on WIP sports talk radio, there was an interview with Doug Pederson, the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles.
One exchange caught my linguistic (as opposed to sports fan) attention:
| Angelo Cataldi: | Doug, did you ever think this would happen to you? |
| Doug Pederson: | I did. |
| Angelo Cataldi: | You did. |
| Doug Pederson: | I did. I did. I did, I didn't think it was going to happen in year two but you know, Angelo, listen, i- if- if- if I don't get into this business not wanting to win the Super Bowl, I'm going to go do something else, you know? |
And just the relevant conditional sentence:
If I don't get into this business
not wanting to win the Super Bowl,
I'm going to go do something else.
This strikes me as a good case for the natural "negative concord" explanation of apparent overnegation.
rosie said,
February 7, 2018 @ 2:37 am
Perhaps "I don't get into this business" is the precondition, and "not wanting to win the Super Bowl" describes him in the hypothetical situation where he doesn't get into this business?
~flow said,
February 7, 2018 @ 5:42 am
@rosie exactly, right? 'Explanatory' came to my mind reading the sentence.
Jerry Friedman said,
February 7, 2018 @ 6:21 pm
rosie and ~flow: That's very ingenious, but given the context, he clearly meant "If I get into this business not wanting to win the Super Bowl, I'm going to go do something else." Also, your interpretation sounds like too elevated a register for spontaneous sports speech, though I admit I have no experience of Pederson's style.
(For the annals of overnegation, I hereby report that a couple days ago I wrote "disproved" when I meant "proved".)
Andrew Usher said,
February 7, 2018 @ 7:14 pm
The problem with that is that it doesn't make sense: he didn't mean "If I get into this business not wanting to win the Super Bowl …" because he was trying to say that that premiss was impossible.
I count this a sort of grammatical disfluency (which we are all guilty of in spontaneous speech): one could best transcribe:
"If I don't get into this business – ([because of] not wanting to win the Super Bowl) – I'm going to go do something else." Not the most eloquent, but not, I think, a usual double negative.
Real negative concord in dialects of English that use it is normally simple and obvious, not likely to be misinterpreted, so if you have to think about it, there's a good chance it's not negative concord (in production).
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stedak said,
February 8, 2018 @ 1:58 am
I almost agree with the previous comment. The speaker sounds to me like he's hesitating between options: "If I don't get into this business wanting to win" competing with "If I get into this business not wanting to win", and coming out as a mixture of both. If you ask the speaker to repeat the sentence, I bet he'd settle on one of those options — whereas with the examples from the negative concord page, like "It ain't no cat can't get in no coop," if you ask the speaker to repeat, they'd probably come out the same.
Is there other psycholinguistic evidence that speakers do have subconscious competing options for what they're about to say?
BZ said,
February 8, 2018 @ 1:04 pm
I think there might be a third element here, the non-conditional "you don't get into this business not wanting to win"
Andrew Usher said,
February 8, 2018 @ 9:17 pm
Yes, of course that's what he _meant_. It didn't quite come out right, though – but your idea presumably is that the required double negation in that sentence may have influenced the seemingly incorrect one actually produced.
Although this could happen to anyone, there are likely a surfeit of examples from sports because sports people are basically required to give many public interviews but it's not their main job and they suffer no consequences for inarticulacy even to extremes (saying something Wrong is of course the only thing that matters).