Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 22:28:32 +0900 From: dcarroll@niji.or.jp Subject: Re: Logic, etc Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: linganth@cc.rochester.edu MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk
Dear Linganthers,

Who says language is based on logic anyway? I suspect that if language can be reduced to some type of symbolic logic it would end up as a decidedly messy, "human" sort of logic based on the kinds of non-classical categorizations dominated by cultural whim described in G. Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things verses the mathmatical, propositional logic so prized by Western cultures.

The very ideal of attacking AAVE (and many other dialects of English) because they use a double negative is itself highly illogical. According to this argument a "single negative" as in "I don't have any." is OK but "I ain't got none." is illogical since two negatives cancel each other out in a mathmatical system. If we allow this line of logic then we must accept "I ain't got none no more" as logically correct as the sum of 3 negatives is of course a negative.

Many problems stem from the fact that many many people, among them many many scholars, are convinced that there truly is only ONE LOGIC and that all other "systematic" phenomena are somehow reducible to this one pure form, i.e. mathmatical logic born of Western, i.e. Greecian, ancestry. I would argue that as linguists and anthropologist all we could hope for is internal system-wide consistancy. If AAVE speakers randomly used or didn't use double negatives or for that matter any other self-consistant system, THEN we might doubt its validity.

******************************************************* Donald Carroll, English Department
International Communications Program
Shikoku Gakuin University
Bunkyo-cho 3-2-16, Zentsuji-shi, Kagawa 765 JAPAN Fax: +81 (877) 63 4329 Email: dcarroll@niji.or.jp *******************************************************

"Grammar, of course, is the model of closely ordered, routinely observable social activities."

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