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What is the reason for the double negation found in some languages?
As @user6726 said in their comment, double negation is a fairly common feature of many languages.
Answering, "What is the reason?", there are two aspects:
"What is the reason?" in meaning, "why does ...
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Are there languages with triple or quadruple negation?
Double negation in languages follows math rules just fine, the better question is what set of math rules get followed, and that depends on the language.
Negative concord: -(x + y + z) = -x - y - z
...
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Are there any languages with only one of "yes" or "no"?
Finnish has particle words for "yes": "Kyllä" (formal) and "joo", "juu", "jep" (very colloquial), but no such words for "no".
However, one ...
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How do languages with negative concord express the actual negation of negative polarity items?
First off, let's take a broader look at multiple negation. Van der Wouden (1994a) describes four different classes of how multiple negation can be interpreted:
double negation (DN), e.g. Standard ...
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why in Polish we change ją to jej when negating the phrase?
Yes, you do understand correctly what those sentences mean.
In the Slavic languages in general and in Polish in particular, the direct object of a verb is in the Accusative case when the verb is ...
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6
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What is the reason for the double negation found in some languages?
Double negation is an extremely common linguistic feature for languages in general and almost universally serves not as a logical predicate but rather to emphasize the negation of the general idea ...
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Analyzing negation with a syntactic tree
Totally depends on your syntax theory.
Some prefer to do it with a NegP, as suggested bei @eijen:
Others assume the negation to be in I:
And then again you could see negation as an adverb ...
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Why is "No" more universal than "Yes"?
A possible hypothesis is that words for "yes" tend to undergo replacement faster than words for "no". Think of the various near-synonyms for "yes" in contemporary English: "sure", "definitely", "...
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the difference between upward and downward entailment
Upward entailment means that if a relation holds for some set X, then the relation will hold for a superset of X.
Downward entailment means that if a relation holds for some X, then the relation will ...
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Why does Thai have no words for "yes" or "no"?
Short answer: Because Thai language has other tools for expressing polarity (affirmation and negation).
Polarity is a grammatical category for expressing the speaker's assertion that a certain clause ...
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Name of assertions in sentences where negation of the whole sentence doesn't negate the assertion
Technically speaking, these are not assertions. The technical term is presupposition.
Assertions are propositions that one can negate, like
The moon is made of green cheese.
whose negation is
The ...
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What makes "can't get any" a double-negative, according to Steven Pinker?
Yeah, it's not. This isn't the first time Pinker beat this particular drum; an earlier instance is this article, where he elaborates a little bit:
What do "any," "even" and "...
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Position of negation in an english sentence
The Original Poster's examples don't imply anything very different from each other. However, the general question of whether or why it matters where we put the negation in a sentence is quite ...
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Name of assertions in sentences where negation of the whole sentence doesn't negate the assertion
What you are looking for is presupposition:
Sentence A presupposes sentence B iff both A entails B and the negation of A entails B.
An alternative definition is that
A presupposition is a ...
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Is there any similar verb negation in other Indo-European languages?
Basically what you are saying is that for this one verb the negative form changes the vowel of the prefix from /ɜ/ to /æ/. Is that right? These correspond to classical Persian bi-tawānad بتواند ...
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Name for tendency of negative morphemes to climb to "outermost" position
Yes. The phenomenon is known as NEG-raising.
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Written languages that acquired negative concord?
I believe that the ne...pas construction of French is post-Old French so that would be an example. Arabic (not all dialects) developed the negative concord element -š subsequent to earlier written ...
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Negation detection software
Take a look at below:
Deep Linguistic Analysis for Topic-level Analysis
Bitext’s API uses Deep Linguistic Analysis based on grammars, which allows for opinion analysis not only at the sentence level,...
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Is there any logic to required double negatives, or is that "just the way it is"?
Different language groups – the rules are usually constant for a whole language group – simply used different conventions how to deal with the negatives.
The Germanic languages are closer to the ...
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Is there any logic to required double negatives, or is that "just the way it is"?
Just an info to consider: Russian's "double negative" employs two different particles. The actual negation particle is "ne". The second particle is "ni" and is actually called "intensifier" in ...
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Why is "No" more universal than "Yes"?
This is not the case outside of indo-european languages, as has been pointed out to you. The most likely candidate for the origin of the nV forms is the PIE form *ne, which was a negation. But it ...
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Scopal relation of negation and quantifier
The sentence formed by combining an element with others is the scope of that element. (Sometimes the element which is said to have a scope is itself excluded from that scope, but including it comes ...
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Analyzing negation with a syntactic tree
Logically, "not" is a sentential adverb. Grammatically, in English, it is an auxiliary verb suffix. The disparity between its logic and its grammar explains why it is so difficult to classify, ...
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2
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What is the reason for the double negation found in some languages?
My language do allow for logically correct sentences (...)
It seems like Bulgarian is a 'misty' case where you can and cannot use double negation. English does not allow that and Polish requires that....
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'What one didn't see was anything' is weird. So why has it persisted?
I think McWhorter is exaggerating his point a bit to try to make English speakers who are used to prescription against "double negatives" rethink their possible prejudices. As far as I know, the use ...
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Does Jespersen's Cycle apply to languages without negative concord?
I think there are two answers that may be helpful here, but before we get to them let's clear up a few things. Negative Concord is not the same thing as Redundant Negation. Negative Concord is a ...
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Are there any languages with only one of "yes" or "no"?
Mandarin has an unambiguous simplex 不 bù which means ‘no’ on its own, but no equivalent simplex that means ‘yes’.
不 does double duty as the negating particle for non-past verbs, so it’s not only used ...
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Negation and Pronouns in Finnish
Native Finnish speaker here.
Your recap of the use of the negation verb is correct, as far as it goes. It's also well documented at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ei#Verb_2
(1) & (3) Both ...
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Negation and Pronouns in Finnish
There's a list of publications on the 'pro-drop'-ness of Finnish (though it's not 'true pro-drop', but that's part of the conclusion), long story short:
Using the subject - when it's grammatically ...
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Are negative comparative operators like "less" typologically rarer than their positive counterparts?
This is to the now edited question:
It maybe surprising for speakers of Standard Average European languages that so-called "particle comparatives" are rare among the languages of the world, most of ...
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