Foundation misnegation
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From Antonio Fortin:
I’m re-reading Asimov's Foundation novels after nearly 35 years and I came across this example in Book 1, which just seems like a mess:
“I don’t say, though,” added Barr, “that there aren’t cases where tech-men haven’t been bribed.”
Obviously, the intended message is that there are cases where tech-men have been bribed, but I’m struggling to arrive at that meaning from the sentence. Shouldn't “haven’t” be “have”? Maybe Language Log readers could help.
The quotation comes from p. 209 (in the 2004 Random House republication):
This does seem to be an example of the "negative concord" type of misnegation.
But perhaps some commenters may have a different calculation, as in this case…
Update — The page image above comes from a 2004 Random House edition featured on Google Books, where I found it. Wikipedia tells us that Foundation's original publication date as a single book was in 1951, but the five stories combined in that book were written and published in Astounding Science Fiction between 1942 and 1950.
A.F. links in the comments to an Errata page noting that "haven't" should have been "have" — presumably the error has been preserved in different editions over the past 70 or 80 years…
Phillip Minden said,
January 11, 2024 @ 6:05 am
A descriptive linguist will explain that this occurs a lot in spoken English, in particular when the last in a chain of negations should lack the negation as per popular prescriptivism but is emphasised in intonation, He will then maybe try and see if the author in question wrote the way he wrote, and passed it by the editor, to colour the character's natural speech, or simply used the device himself, consciously or not.
A.F. said,
January 11, 2024 @ 6:17 am
This typo, if it is one, is noted in these errata: https://bookerrata.com/books/foundation.html
However, given that Mark's edition is different to mine and the above proofreader, I suspect that the misnegation is in original manuscript.
Pedro said,
January 11, 2024 @ 7:25 am
I've noticed a similar phenomenon in certain past conditional sentences. Instead of "I would have loved to see that" or "I would love to have seen that" (both of which refer to an even in the immediate past, but placing the speaker's counterfactual appreciation of it either at the time of the event or in the present), you often hear "I would have loved to have seen that."
Theoretically, this should refer to the speaker's appreciation in the past or an event further back in time (the event is effectively in the pluperfect) but in reality it seems to be a sort of "past concord". Has anyone done any analysis on this type of construction?
Peter Taylor said,
January 11, 2024 @ 9:35 am
It's present in the original magazine:
https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v33n06_1944-08_Gorgon776/page/n31/mode/2up
Annie Gottlieb said,
January 11, 2024 @ 9:46 am
You're right.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 11, 2024 @ 9:49 am
I recently noticed an apparent misnegation on the rather over-elaborate packaging of the alcoholic Advent calendar my wife gave me this past December, namely "FOR THERE IS NOTHING LOST, THAT MAY BE FOUND IF SOUGHT." It seemed that a "NOT" should appear before "BE" for it to make sense. But googling revealed that it's an accurate quote from _The Faerie Queene_. I don't know whether: a) Spenser was engaged in some sort of "poetic license" deviating from ordinary syntax; b) Spenser was trying to convey a counterintuitive substantive point; or c) something was different about late 16th-century English so that it would not have struck them odd at first the way it struck me.
Noam said,
January 11, 2024 @ 9:55 am
I guess the intended meaning seems to be, from context, the opposite, but I would definitely comfortably interpret that sentence in isolation to be saying, snarkily, that they’re essentially always bribed. Something like “I’m not saying that all his deals are corrupt” (with an implied “just most”).
Phillip Minden said,
January 11, 2024 @ 10:11 am
Spenser: The meaning is simply a bit different, I'd think. What the phrase says is that if something just needs seeking in order to be found, it doesn't qualify to be labelled lost.
languagehat said,
January 11, 2024 @ 10:17 am
JWB: The Spenser line has frequently puzzled modern readers; the best explanation I've seen is here: "It's an inverted form if 'if it may be found, it's not really lost.'"
languagehat said,
January 11, 2024 @ 10:18 am
(I should have added [sic] after the first "if," which should of course be "of.")
Bloix said,
January 11, 2024 @ 11:19 am
I'm listening to the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey (recommended, BTW, for the kind of person who likes this blog), which discussed the Beatles' All You Need is Love recently. I've never understood the lyrics:
(Love, love, love) There's nothing you can do that can't be done
(Love…) Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
(Love…) Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy …
And more of the "nothing you can … that can't"…" pattern for two more stanzas.
https://genius.com/The-beatles-all-you-need-is-love-lyrics
Hickey never touches the question of what these lyrics are supposed to mean.
Now, this is a Lennon song so it's remotely possible that there's an intended subversive or ironic meaning, but given everything else we know that would be odd, and it seems always to be understood as a straightforward pean to the power of love. Is the "nothing you can … that can't" structure a mistake? Or is it intentional nonsense?
Rodger C said,
January 11, 2024 @ 11:31 am
I suspect Spenser was going for "but may be found," and missed.
Phillip Minden said,
January 11, 2024 @ 11:36 am
I honestly don't understand what's difficult about Spenser's sentence, in particular if you read it with a feel for 1590 English. No need to assume a mistake, or even "mis"-negation usage.
David Marjanović said,
January 11, 2024 @ 12:06 pm
Has the "resumption" type of misnegation been covered? I mean "I think" automatically turning into "I don't think" when appended to a negation ("that's not true, I don't think", "that shouldn't be done, I don't think" = "I don't think that's true", "I don't think that should be done"). It seems to be pretty common in the US; G. H. W. Bush used it.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 11, 2024 @ 1:29 pm
Telling me that in some deep ontological sense nothing that's in principle findable is truly lost is not helpful when I'm looking for my car keys. There's poetry for you, with its scorn for utility. Although I accept that "lost" may be polysemous and the balance between different senses may have been different in late 16th century usage than it might be today.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 11, 2024 @ 1:43 pm
Maybe one way to zero in on the difficulty is that I don't in most (not all) contexts interpret "lost" to mean "irrevocably lost" unless that's explicitly specified. That may have changed over the century, and/or which specific contexts carry some contrary implicature of "irrevocably unless explicitly stated not to be" may have shifted over the centuries. I don't know if it's relevant that in current usage "lost" with an implicature of "irrevocably" that's not explicitly stated is not infrequently a euphemism for "dead."
Phillip Minden said,
January 11, 2024 @ 2:28 pm
You put your hand in your coat pocket and don't feel your keys. Will you give up for good and hail a cab? Nah, for there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 11, 2024 @ 3:24 pm
@Phillip M.: well, I wouldn't start with my coat pocket since I near-invariably keep my keys in the (front right) pocket of my trousers when out and about. But I was thinking of the before-leaving-the-house-in-the-morning scenario. I suffer from the admitted First World Problem of living in a fairly large house with lots of rooms, so if the keys aren't in one of the quite limited number of places I would typically have placed them when undressing the night before, they could be anywhere. "99%+ likely to be somewhere in this house" != "can predictably be located in a fairly short period of time," and thus fits within one sense, although not all senses, of "lost."
Phillip Minden said,
January 11, 2024 @ 3:52 pm
Got that, and that's exactly where Spenser would protest the word. :)
J.W. Brewer said,
January 11, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
Maybe worth noting that the "Spenser" quote is not a statement by some omniscient third-party narrator but from dialogue (okay, "dialogue" that rhymes and scans …) put by Spenser in the mouth of a character, viz. Artegall. Although I take it Artegall is a "good guy" character unlikely to say too many things that Spenser himself would have dissented from.
Bloix said,
January 11, 2024 @ 6:18 pm
In context, it seems to me that Spenser is saying that if something is lost BY SOMEONE, then it eventually will be found BY SOMEONE ELSE. It's not an encouraging bit of nonsense – "cheer up, we'll find it!"; it's a stoic reflection on a sort of impersonal conservation of matter – "things that are lost to you still exist, whether or not you can ever retrieve them."
“What though the sea with waves continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all ;
Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought :
For whatsoever from one place doth fall
Is with the tyde unto another brought :
For there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.”
Steve Morrison said,
January 11, 2024 @ 9:24 pm
Nitpick: as I understand it, the first story, “The Psychohistorians,” was written specifically for the book publication. Asimov decided that the series began too abruptly and so needed a prequel.
Phillip Minden said,
January 12, 2024 @ 5:27 am
@Bloix, he generalises, or argues with a general idea.
Thanks for the longer quotation; I should read more of it, just have to seek the time.
Phillip Minden said,
January 12, 2024 @ 5:31 am
@Mark Liberman, you still insist it is a mistake, even an inadvertent one? Not that that would be impossible, but I don't see the necessity. The errata page seems to be fan-made, and that fan could be the usually folksily prescriptive non-linguist.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 12, 2024 @ 9:26 am
It is certainly possible that if I had come across the Spenser line while reading through that canto in order, rather than an isolated quote, it would not have consciously struck me as odd and potentially a misnegation. However, having first seen it as an isolated quotation w/o context and having been struck funny by it, going back and reading the stanza it was from (which I had done before my initial comment in this thread) did not immediately cure my puzzlement even though I did discern what Bloix calls the "impersonal conservation of matter" idea running through the previous lines.
Jason M said,
January 13, 2024 @ 1:06 pm
@Bloix. I fully agree that these Andrew Hickey podcasts on music are works of scholarship and art. I am a huge fan.
As for Lennon’s lyrics in All You Need Is Love, they always seemed typical of the vague oriental spiritualism of the Beatles at the time. Kind of koan like, or Tao-like: “The tao that can be sung is not the eternal tao”…or…”Limitless undying love” type of thing?
Dennis Paul Himes said,
January 17, 2024 @ 7:25 pm
It should be noted that a grammatical error in dialog in a work of fiction is not necessarily an error on the part of the author. Asimov may have known it was ungrammatical, but nonetheless felt it was something the character would say.
Dennis Paul Himes said,
January 17, 2024 @ 7:26 pm
I guess "grammatical" is not the right term here. Substitute "incorrect".
Dennis Paul Himes said,
January 17, 2024 @ 7:28 pm
I fear to correct myself again, since my first correction just compounded my errors. Let's start over again:
It should be noted that a error in dialog in a work of fiction is not necessarily an error on the part of the author. Asimov may have known it was incorrect, but nonetheless felt it was something the character would say.
Dennis Paul Himes said,
January 17, 2024 @ 7:29 pm
I fear to correct myself again, since my first correction just compounded my errors. Let's start over again:
It should be noted that a error in dialog in a work of fiction is not necessarily an error on the part of the author. Asimov may have known it was incorrect, but nonetheless felt it was something the character would say.
This line is here just to convince the software that I'm not really duplicating my previous comment.