#negative concord

[allthingslinguistic]

Anne Curzan’s keynote at the American Copy Editors Society sparked some discussion about multiple negation on twitter. 

[thesmithian-blog]

A different case is “negative concord,” recorded all over the United States in some African American English...as in “I don’t see him no more” and “Don’t nothing come to a sleeper but a dream.” In these sentences, the negatives reinforce each other instead of canceling each other out. And consider this expression from fourteenth-century England: “There nas [was not] no man nowhere so virtuous.” It’s by Chaucer, and is just one example of many from his era and earlier. But there is no direct relation. Negative concord, as wrong as it sounds to those who grew up without it, is common among the world’s languages.

more.

[mxworthing]

Does anyone know if Hebrew has negative concord? I'm trying to figure out how to say "I don't like anything" and I don't know if I need to say אני לא אוהבת שום דבר. or אני לא אוהבת כול הדברים. Or if I need to be saying something else entirely.

[allthingslinguistic]

The Dangers of Falling For A Linguist

I met a little lady from way down south and I thought she was kinda sweet. She had a tasty tongue in a cowgirl mouth that said things you’d wanna repeat.[...]

Oh, I bought her a ring, and I bought her a home, and I got her set up nice and neat. But sometimes I’d worry she would use me and roam, and whenever I did, she’d repeat,

“I don’t want none of your money, sweet, I don’t care for no one but you. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to cheat – that ain’t nothin’ I’d wanna do.”

So now why am I sittin’ with my head hangin’ low with nothin’ left, not even pride, wonderin’ where my sweetheart and my money did go and how I got took for a ride?

My gal was a master of verbal predation, a lawyer who took her reward – she tripped up my ears with double negation that I thought was negative concord

"Don't Tell Me No Lies" by James Harbeck (full poem here)

 On the other hand, maybe a linguist would write love poems with words like "negative concord" in them. And that would probably be worth it.

See also linguist do it jokes and linguist breakup lines.