All Questions
Tagged with pragmatics negation
4 questions
7
votes
3
answers
515
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How do languages with negative concord express the actual negation of negative polarity items?
This is something I started wondering while working on formal logic, but I'm having trouble finding any papers that address it. Obviously, the standard way to express negation with a polarity item in ...
- 180
4
votes
0
answers
90
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Historical changes from 'not yet' to 'not again' and vice-versa
A two part question. Are there attested historical changes whereby a construction C in some language means 'not yet', and then C changes in meaning so that it means 'not again' at a later time (or ...
user483
24
votes
4
answers
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Is "double positive meaning negative" a common phenomenon?
The following joke is popular:
An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as ...
- 1,227
6
votes
1
answer
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Reference request: ways of indicating disagreement
There are lots of ways to indicate you disagree with some aspect of an utterance. I'm thinking here of the spectrum that includes "No, not-X," "Well, not-X," "Hey, wait a minute! Not-X!" "Yes, you're ...
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