{"id":26904,"date":"2016-07-23T06:30:05","date_gmt":"2016-07-23T11:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=26904"},"modified":"2016-07-23T06:46:37","modified_gmt":"2016-07-23T11:46:37","slug":"indistinguishable-misnegation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=26904","title":{"rendered":"Indistinguishable misnegation"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Frum, \"Donald Trump's Bad Bet on Anger<\/a>\", The Atlantic<\/em> 7\/21\/2016 [emphasis added]<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s supporters yearn for the country as it was and fear the country as it is. Tonight\u2019s powerfully dystopian Trump nomination acceptance address will touch them at their deepest emotional core. It will ignite a passionate spasm of assent from those many, many Americans\u2014mostly but not exclusively white, mostly but not exclusively less affluent and educated\u2014who experience today as worse than yesterday, and anticipate a tomorrow worse than today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t think it won\u2019t work. It will work. The speech will be viewed and viewed again, on cable news and social media. The travails and troubles of this dysfunctional convention will recede, even if their implications and consequences linger. Trump\u2019s poll numbers will probably rise. Small-dollar donations will surely flow. Many wavering Republicans will come home\u2014even if the home to which they now return has changed in ways that render it almost indistinguishable from the dwelling it used to be.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ian Preston<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

Does \"even if .. almost indistinguishable from\" for \"even if … almost unrecognisable as\" count as a misnegation? \u00a0Unless I misunderstand what he is trying to say, that seems to be what David Frum must have meant to convey here. \u00a0Feels like some sort of \"poor monkey brains\" problem anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

The typical ingredients of (one variety of what we've been calling misnegation<\/em><\/a>) are here, namely a scalar predicate<\/em> (here implied by \"even if … almost\") , a modal<\/em> (here the morpheme -able<\/em>). and some\u00a0negation<\/em> (here the morpheme in-\/un-<\/em>), all combined\u00a0so as to turn the statement into the opposite of what was intended.<\/p>\n

David Frum<\/a> wants to say that changes in the Republican party leave it\u00a0so far away from\u00a0its former identity that it's almost not\u00a0possible to recognize them as the same. But he actually says that those changes move the Republican party to a place so close\u00a0to its former identity that it's almost not possible to tell them apart.<\/p>\n

For added irony, what he actually says is exactly the position that the whole article attempts\u00a0to refute:<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s speech was advertised as an update of Richard Nixon\u2019s 1968 \u201csilent majority\u201d address. It is nothing of the kind. This is a bulletin from a grimmer and more pessimistic society than that which would shortly afterward land a man on the moon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ian's \"poor monkey brains\" quote is a reference to one of the explanations that I offered for a somewhat different subtype\u00a0of misnegation (\"'Cannot underestimate' = 'must not underestimate'?<\/a>\", 11\/6\/2008):<\/p>\n

\n

As recently noted<\/a>, people often get confused about English phrases involving negatives combined with other negatives, modals, or scalar predicates, and there's a series of Language Log posts<\/a> that collectively offer several (non-exclusive) hypotheses for why this confusion is so easy to fail to miss<\/a>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Our poor monkey brains<\/a> just can't deal with complex combinations of certain logical operators;<\/li>\n
  2. The connection between English and modal logic<\/a> may involve some unexpected ambiguities;<\/li>\n
  3. Negative concord is alive and well<\/a> in English (or in UG);<\/li>\n
  4. Odd things become idioms or at least verbal habits (\"could care less<\/a>\"; \"fail to miss<\/a>\"; \"still unpacked<\/a>\").<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n

    (See also \"Multiplex negatio ferblondiat<\/a>\", 7\/14\/2007.)<\/p>\n

    In the case of Frum's similarity-inversion, the \"poor monkey brains\" story seems to be the only plausible explanation — though we might update it a bit to read \"Our poor monkey brains just can't deal with complex combinations of certain logical operators, especially with respect to the logic of contemporary American politics<\/a>\".<\/p>\n

    The obligatory screenshot:<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    David Frum, \"Donald Trump's Bad Bet on Anger\", The Atlantic 7\/21\/2016 [emphasis added]: Donald Trump\u2019s supporters yearn for the country as it was and fear the country as it is. Tonight\u2019s powerfully dystopian Trump nomination acceptance address will touch them at their deepest emotional core. It will ignite a passionate spasm of assent from those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-semantics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26904"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26914,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26904\/revisions\/26914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}