An update on Negative!
It seems I'm not the only one who thinks it's ok to not think of negation as a toggle switch (besides the thousands of other linguists and the millions of speakers of languages that use double negatives, that is). It turns out when pidgin communication becomes creole language in the next generation, a common feature of those languages is that they allow double negatives!
posted by Sarah @ 5:12 PM
2 Comments:
You probably already know this, but double negatives were common in Middle English. Chaucer and John Gower used them.
I did, but thanks for pointing it out. I'd forgotten. =]
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