{"id":47671,"date":"2020-07-15T05:57:59","date_gmt":"2020-07-15T10:57:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=47671"},"modified":"2020-07-15T06:56:10","modified_gmt":"2020-07-15T11:56:10","slug":"the-difficulties-of-negation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=47671","title":{"rendered":"The difficulties of negation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dmitry Ostrovsky reacted to a litotic sentence in Bari Weiss's resignation letter<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don\u2019t still labor for this newspaper.\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Dmitry's email:<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>and\u00a0the negation arising from don't<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Symbolically, there's a difference between \u2203x ~F(x) and ~\u2203x F(x) .<\/p>\n

In (slightly simplified) Heavy English, this is the difference between<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. There exist talented journalists such that it is not the case that they still work here.<\/li>\n
  2. It is not the case that there exist talented journalists that still work here.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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

    But Weiss's intended meaning was based on (2), where the negation takes wide scope:<\/p>\n

    There are talented journalists who still work here.\u00a0 [What she meant]<\/em><\/p>\n

    It is not the case that there are talented journalists who still work here. [The opposite]<\/em><\/p>\n

    None of this means that it is not the case there there are talented journalists who still work here.\u00a0 [Her meaning again via litotes]<\/em><\/p>\n

    There's enough variation in reactions to such sentences to create a substantial literature. A small sample includes\u00a0 Guy Carden's 1970 dissertation \"Logical predicates and idiolect variation in English\",\u00a0 my 1974 paper with Ivan Sag, \"Prosodic Form and Discourse Function<\/a>\", and a 2010 book chapter by Tottie and Neukom-Hermann, \"Quantifier-negation interaction in English: A corpus linguistic study of all…not constructions<\/a>\".<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

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

    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\u2019t 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\" […]<\/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":[273,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misnegation","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\/47671","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=47671"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47681,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47671\/revisions\/47681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}