## The difficulties of negation

Dmitry Ostrovsky reacted to a litotic sentence in Bari Weiss's resignation letter:

"None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper."

Dmitry's email:

This strikes me as very odd. It is not a simple "arithmetic" misnegation, if "none of this means that" and "don't" are dropped the sentence obviously would have a meaning intended by Ms. Weiss "[…] some of the most talented journalists in the world […] still labor for this newspaper", but as written it doesn't work. The trouble, it seems to me, is the word "some". If "None of this means that" (a straightforward negation) is removed, the sentence would have the structure "S don’t still labor for this newspaper", but almost anything is true about S when S = "some of the most talented journalists in the world" — S like beer and S hate soccer, S work late and S rise early, S read LL and S don't read even their own publication. And thus, no matter what is your statement about S, its negation is wrong.

I think the sentence does say what its author meant, or at least can say what it's author meant. Dmitry's problem comes from the scope ambiguity involving the existential quantification associated with some and the negation arising from don't.

Symbolically, there's a difference between ∃x ~F(x) and ~∃x F(x) .

In (slightly simplified) Heavy English, this is the difference between

1. There exist talented journalists such that it is not the case that they still work here.
2. It is not the case that there exist talented journalists that still work here.

Dmitry's argument is valid based on interpretation (1), as long as any talented journalists exist who once worked for the NYT.

But Weiss's intended meaning was based on (2), where the negation takes wide scope:

There are talented journalists who still work here.  [What she meant]

It is not the case that there are talented journalists who still work here. [The opposite]

None of this means that it is not the case there there are talented journalists who still work here.  [Her meaning again via litotes]

There's enough variation in reactions to such sentences to create a substantial literature. A small sample includes  Guy Carden's 1970 dissertation "Logical predicates and idiolect variation in English",  my 1974 paper with Ivan Sag, "Prosodic Form and Discourse Function", and a 2010 book chapter by Tottie and Neukom-Hermann, "Quantifier-negation interaction in English: A corpus linguistic study of all…not constructions".

The standard cases for this scope kind of scope ambiguity are things like "All the arrows didn't hit the target", where the difference may be clearer.

1. ### ardj said,

July 15, 2020 @ 6:11 am

I think it is even simpler than your approach to show what is meant.. Try putting the sentence as a positive statement:
"None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper" then becomes, "None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world do still labor for this newspaper."
Clearly this would then be your (ml's) case 1above., and would say that no talented j's still labour at thsi newspaper.
But if we put the negative back, as in the original, then the conclusion must be that some talented j's do still labour &c.

2. ### Philip Taylor said,

July 15, 2020 @ 6:13 am

I think that my interpretation is different to all those offered above. Leave aside the introduction — the key part is surely "some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still [work] for this newspaper". That statement is surely a truism. Whilst someof the most talented journalists in the world may still work for "this newspaper", others may have done so in the past and moved on, and others may never have worked for "this newspaper" in the first place. Unless "this newspaper" has a 100% monopoly on "the most talented journalists in the world" ($p=0$), the statement is undeniably true. So whatever "this" was such that "none of 'this' means that S", that simply tells us that "this" was irrelevant to the statement that followed.

3. ### Michael Watts said,

July 15, 2020 @ 6:18 am

I agree that it's common for negation on a sentence or sentence-like phrase to appear on the verb, even when the sentence constructed that way would really seem to indicate some other meaning. No specific example comes to mind, but I've noted this kind of thing in the past. My analysis (which, so far as I can see, exactly parallels the one in the post) would go like this:

1. Common structure: "None of this means that ~X", which says "Despite all of this, X is still true".

2. Here, X is "some of the most talented journalists in the world still labor for this newspaper". There's nothing weird about this positive-polarity phrase.

3. ~X automatically becomes "some of the most talented journalists in the world don't still labor for this newspaper". If you were more careful, you could negate X differently, but you weren't.

Compare "all that glitters is not gold".

(Also compare Tolkien's rendering of the aphorism, "all that is gold does not glitter". I think that one is basically just a mistake.)

4. ### Anne Cutler said,

July 15, 2020 @ 6:44 am

I'm with Mark, and it all would have been clear to all, I think, if the writer had put the negation earlier than she did (perhaps for want of the perfect negating verb, which I couldn't find either):

None of this denies/renders false/contraindicates that some of the most talented journalists in the world labor for this newspaper

5. ### Philip Taylor said,

July 15, 2020 @ 7:41 am

[Follow-up to my comment above]. After further thought, I now realise that "don't still work" and "still don't work" are not interchangeable.

If "some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still [work] for this newspaper", then they used for work for "this newspaper" but have now left (presumably for the greener grass elsewhere); had the assertion instead read "some of the most talented journalists in the world still don’t [work] for this newspaper", then those journalists have chosen to work elsewhere (in preference to choosing to work for "this newspaper"), and there is an implicit suggestion that "this newspaper" needs to do more to attract them.

All of this, of course, from the perspective of a native speaker of British English; I have no idea whether "still don't work" and "don't still work" mean the same or have two different meanings in American English.

6. ### Samuel Buggeln said,

July 15, 2020 @ 8:25 am

… yes, or put "some" later, i.e., "None of this means that this newspaper doesn't still employ some of the most talented journalists in the world." Though on a rhetorical level for obvious reasons she wanted to focus on the writers' labor rather than the newspaper's employing. And the rhetoric is probably more important than the strict logic.

7. ### David Marjanović said,

July 15, 2020 @ 9:10 am

I agree that the sentence says what the author wants it to say. The reason the second negation appears so late in the sentence is simply that English negates verbs.

German negates nouns instead: more like "none of this means that none of the most talented journalists in the world still labor for this newspaper."

8. ### David Marjanović said,

July 15, 2020 @ 9:12 am

…never trust a native speaker. The easier option in German, in this case, is actually "none of this means that not still some of the most talented journalists in the world still labor for this newspaper."

That would be really awkward in English, though, because English likes to negate verbs as immediately as possible.

9. ### Gregory Kusnick said,

July 15, 2020 @ 9:44 am

If we replace "some of the most talented journalists in the world" with "people I admire and respect", I think it's clearer that the sentence means what she meant it to say.

10. ### Scott P. said,

July 15, 2020 @ 9:53 am

Just because the sentence includes the word 'some' doesn't mean it's an expression in the propositional calculus. 'Some' here isn't really being used as a qualifier, but as a concessive intended to make the phrase sound less absolute. Remove "some of the" and the sentence is essentially the same.

One could also note that this sentence could have been introduced into the discussion of 'the best' being used as a collective a few days ago.

11. ### Philip Taylor said,

July 15, 2020 @ 10:00 am

How can one know, Scott, that "'Some' here isn't really being used as a qualifier, but as a concessive intended to make the phrase sound less absolute" ? It seems to me that only the author can know what interpretation he or she intended; we (the readers) can only infer or guess.

12. ### Ellen K. said,

July 15, 2020 @ 10:10 am

I think it's about the scope of the first negative over the "some don't" statement.

Not "some don't" = all do (which isn't true, in this case). In an arithmetic sort of logic, the construction wouldn't work. I suspect this is the logic Dmitry Ostrovsky is using in saying it doesn't seem to work.

But, language doesn't always work like that. I would say that "Some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper" wouldn't work on it's own without the leading "None of this means that…". The two negatives work together.

For me as a reader, it simply and straightforwardly means that some of the world's most talented journalists work for that newspaper, and whatever was said previously doesn't negate that.

13. ### Ellen K. said,

July 15, 2020 @ 10:14 am

I think how I wrote that isn't clear.

NOT "some don't = all do

That whole bit as an equation. (And continue from there with my 2nd paragraph above.)

14. ### ktschwarz said,

July 15, 2020 @ 10:43 am

English doesn't always have to negate the main verb. There are other options, like sticking in an existential to move the negation higher:

None of this means that there aren't still some of the most talented journalists in the world laboring for this newspaper.

Or better, as Anne Cutler said, use a negating verb to bring it even closer:

None of this denies that there are still some of the most talented journalists in the world laboring for this newspaper.

I think the potentially confusing "some" is dispensable, too:

None of this denies that there are still world-class journalists laboring for this newspaper.

The original does say what it wants to say, but it's stilted and prolix. (Ellen, YOUR version is simple and straightforward! That's because you put the two negatives right next to each other.)

15. ### Scott P. said,

July 15, 2020 @ 11:03 am

How can one know, Scott, that "'Some' here isn't really being used as a qualifier, but as a concessive intended to make the phrase sound less absolute" ?

Because the sentence reads and means the same thing when it is taken out, which isn't the case when 'some' is used as a qualifier.

16. ### Philip Taylor said,

July 15, 2020 @ 11:14 am

I think (with the greatest respect, Scott) that that is a circular argument. It only "means the same thing when it is taken out" if it is, as you suggested, not "being used as a qualifier, but as a concessive intended to make the phrase sound less absolute". If it is being used as a qualifier (which is how I interpret it), then the sentence does not mean the same thing when it is taken out.

And since neither of us can know what the sentence means, but only attempt to infer it, neither of us can know whether "some" is being used as qualifier or concessive. You reach one conclusion, I reach another, and only the author is in a position to say with any authority which of us (if either) is right.

17. ### Robert Coren said,

July 15, 2020 @ 11:32 am

@Michael Watts: Following your tangential remark about the Tolkien "rendering" of the aphorism about glittering and gold, I suggest that you might be misreading Tolkien. He did not mean to simply rephrase the common aphorism "All that glitters is not gold", which suggests that there are things that appear to be gold but are actually something less valuable; he was conveying the related idea that there are some things that do not appear to be of golden quality, but are. (Specifically, Aragorn, who appears to be a mere "Ranger", but is in fact a king of ancient lineage.)

18. ### Julian Hook said,

July 15, 2020 @ 11:54 am

(1) The line in The Merchant of Venice is actually "All that glisters [not glitters] is not gold."

(2) Decades ago, when I was working on a PhD in mathematical logic, I found that something I hoped was true turned out not to be true, but some part of it was salvageable. I wrote a note to my adviser saying "All is not lost, or at least not all is lost." He liked it. I can't remember if that line ended up in the thesis or not…

19. ### Jerry Friedman said,

July 15, 2020 @ 12:55 pm

I agree that this is the same kind of negation as in "All that glitters is not gold," but I'd say that in a sentence that's already complicated by a negation in the main clause, the writer should be more careful (to use Michael Watts's word) by trying for a closer resemblance to formal logic.

Robert Coren: I'll add that Tolkien used the "not all" form in the following line, but it wouldn't have worked in the "gold" line for reasons of meter and probably off-rhyme.

Julian Hook: "All that glitters is not gold" has been a proverb at least since Dryden used it as "All, as they say, that glitters is not gold" in The Hind and the Panther in 1687.

20. ### Bloix said,

July 15, 2020 @ 1:22 pm

This is a great example of the journalistic convention that you must not say unqualifiedly that anything or anyone is the best, greatest, largest, whatever. But you must also not say merely that the thing is "great" or "tough" or "best." You may say it is "the most," "the "toughest," the best" but in the same breath you must qualify your statement. It must be "some of the" or "one of the" or "among the" or "arguably the" or "quite arguably the." This way, you can be as over-emphatic as you like without exposing yourself to an argument that you're wrong.

21. ### Ken said,

July 15, 2020 @ 8:38 pm

I came across this difficult-to-parse example today: "They didn’t fail to absolutely disappoint us." The topic was the food at Olive Garden.

22. ### JPL said,

July 15, 2020 @ 8:41 pm

The question is does the sentence accurately express what the author meant; but let's first look at the question of what the author meant. From her resignation letter I gather that her message includes the following ideas:
1. The NYT and other once- great journalistic institutions (Wapo and The Guardian?) have betrayed their standards and lost sight of their principles and have thus become degraded, no longer great.
2. The journalists who labor for the NYT are among the most talented in the world.
3. The degradation of standards at the Times has not caused these journalists to also resign and go elsewhere.
4. It is heartbreaking that these talented journalists have to operate in this illiberal environment.
So the relation between the "this" (the degradation at the Times, not the argument that the Times has been degraded) and the fact that the journalists are still working there is a causal relation out there in the world, not a relation purely in the logic of argument: given the degradation, one might have expected these journalists to resign, giving the degradation as a reason, but they haven't. So I would suggest the following sentence as a more accurate expression of what she wanted to say. (You don't really need the litotes.)
5. None of this affects [or better, "has affected"] the fact that some of the most talented journalists in the world still labor for the New York Times in spite of the degradation of the institution; but what is especially heartbreaking is that these talented journalists have to operate in such an illiberal environment.
I realize I have avoided the real problems of reference and quantifier scope wrt litotes. But if you substitute "has meant" for "means" in the above (Weiss's) sentence it seems to favor the causal interpretation rather than the logic of argument one, and that seems to lessen the litotes effect.

23. ### Robert Coren said,

July 16, 2020 @ 9:32 am

@Ken: That comment on the Olive Garden is presumably intended to be a pseudo-subtle way of trashing the place. It reminds me of a joke I read in distant childhood, about a parent bringing their purportedly prodigious child to a distinguished pianist for evaluation, and getting the considered response of "The young lady is not without a certain lack of talent".

24. ### Sean Richardson said,

July 16, 2020 @ 8:02 pm

Would it be unsporting to suggest that an author's choice to phrase some of a public statement in a litotic manner is less illogic than mere rhetoric?

25. ### Chester Draws said,

July 16, 2020 @ 8:02 pm

There are talented journalists who still work here. [What she meant]

It might be what she meant, but it isn't what she said.

To my way of parsing it, she says "There may be talented journalists who still work here".

A negation of a negation is not a positive, it is just what it is — a negation of the opposite. 'I did not say I didn't do it" does not mean "I said I did it".

Maybe there are talented journalists at the NYT, maybe there isn't. She ain't saying.

26. ### Michael Watts said,

July 16, 2020 @ 10:42 pm

A negation of a negation is not a positive, it is just what it is — a negation of the opposite. 'I did not say I didn't do it" does not mean "I said I did it".

"I did not say I didn't do it" is not a negation of a negation. It's a negation of the positive sentence "I said I didn't do it".

27. ### Jen in Edinburgh said,

July 17, 2020 @ 4:12 am

After three attempts I still haven't managed to read this with anything other than the intended meaning (or what I think is the intending meaning – something like 'I'm not saying there aren't good people here trying their best in bad circumstances, but…').

Can anyone help me?

28. ### David Marjanović said,

July 17, 2020 @ 8:45 am

I came across this difficult-to-parse example today: "They didn’t fail to absolutely disappoint us." The topic was the food at Olive Garden.

That's not difficult: "we expected them to disappoint us, and they lived up to that expectation rather than failing it".

29. ### Jerry Friedman said,

July 17, 2020 @ 3:01 pm

Jen in Edinburgh: I'd say the unintended literal meaning is "Despite what I said above, it's possible that all of the most talented journalists in the world labor at this newspaper. I'm not telling you that some of them don't."

(So now that you mention it, I disagree with Dmitry Ostrovsky's analysis.)

It does come out as praise of the NYT reporters, but probably stronger than she meant—especially if she wants to get a job at another newspaper, one that might not have any of the most talented journalists in the world.

30. ### DaveK said,

July 17, 2020 @ 6:34 pm

She could have written “None of this means that the Times doesn’t have some of the world’s most talented journalists working for it”.
In fact she may have considered that wording and decided it gave too much agency to the newspaper and not enough to the journalists, so she recast it and created a monster

31. ### JPL said,

July 18, 2020 @ 4:20 am

Let me try to express my point above in a slightly different way. The word "means" in that sentence is ambiguous. It has two relevant senses: 1. logical implication, a relation between premises and a conclusion (q implies p); and 2. causal relation between events in the referred to world (event c is a condition that makes event e possible). What unifies the two is that what is expressed is a dependency relation between the two terms q/c and p/e; in sense 2 the logical dependency relation is attributed to the world. An example of 'mean' in sense 2 might be: "The fact that their home was flooded meant that they had to put up at a hotel." I was suggesting that what is expressed in Weiss's sentence is sense 2, not sense 1. If you look at the letter it seems clear that she is concerned with a particular group of people, namely the journalists who have been working for the Times, who are among the most talented, etc. She is not making an indefinite reference to a class of which examples could be given, but making a definite reference to those journalists, who could all be named. And she is saying that the troubling and discouraging conditions at the Times recently have not discouraged these particular journalists from continuing (the "still" is important) to labor ("labor" implying perhaps maintaining a sincere and stoic loyalty) for the newspaper. So I'm suggesting that what is expressed is not something like "I'm not implying (by whatever I've said) that the Times doesn't still employ some of the most talented journalists in the world" or "I'm not implying that there are not any talented journalists who still work at the Times." With the causal interpretation of "means" the logical problems of polarity seem lessened, and we get "none of these conditions have discouraged these journalists from …" seeming to come through as the author's intended meaning.