Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 12:57:59 -0500 (EST) From: "Harold F. Schiffman" Subject: Double negatives and logic Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: Alan Rumsey Cc: linganth@cc.rochester.edu MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk I discovered an interesting contrast in my own speech once, a contrast in meaning between:

a. I don't want nothin'

b. I don't want nothing.

a. seems to be equivalent to 'I don't want anything' whereas b. was used to mean 'nothing is not want I want' i.e. 'I want something' (but I'm not sure what I want).

The style in a. is of course casual, with /ng/ replaced by /n/, and in myspeech would only be used ironically.

I guess I have two kinds of logic in my speech, one for non-standard utterances, one for more standard kinds of utterances(?)

;-)

Hal Schiffman