Concord and Doubling Phenomena: an Introduction

摘要

Formal semanticists have difficulty facing the fact that the law of double negation (DN) does not appear to hold in a vast majority of the languages of the world. In many languages, multiple negations may, semantically, yield one negation, and this is difficult to understand if each of the negations involves a semantic negation. One can assert, even in English, 'If you ain't got nothing to hide, then you don't need no privacy'-while meaning 'If you got nothing to hide, you don't need privacy'. A primary school teacher could say that this is bad English, and that it reflects illogical thinking. However, for a lot of languages, and for a lot of speakers of American English, something like this is just the right way to say these things. So we have to live with the linguistic fact that, for instance, a DN may imply a single negation. Or,