2. Approaches to the multiple negation classification
According to Palacios Martinez (2001:480), different studies on the expression of negation in several non-standard varieties of English also draw our attention to multiple negative structures. Crystal (1995:326), for example, records the existence of treble and quadruple negatives in the English spoken in Farnworth, a municipal borough in the Greater Bolton area, north of Manchester. Trudgill (1990:13) also mentions that many non-standard dialects of British English such as Cockney have retained the old negative form, so that it is possible to come across expressions such as I don 't want no dinner. We also learn that in general Scottish English, multiple negation seems to be excluded from the system; however, in the Glasgow dialect, multiple negation is quite common. Finally, Labov (1972a, 1972b) and Baugh (1983) among others explain in great detail the expression of multiple negation in Black English Vernacular. Fascinating examples like the following are recorded: It ain't no cat can't get in no coop; Back in them times, there ain't no kid around that ain't-wasn't even thinkin' about smokin' no reefers (Labov, 1972:130); It ain't no way no girl can't wear no platforms to no amusement park (Baugh, 1983:83).
The rise and decline of multiple negation has been one of the central issues in the study of English negation and called forth active discussions, but there seems to be no agreement about the date when the decline of multiple negation begins to take place. This is mainly because the definitions of multiple negation vary from one scholar to another depending on the period(s) under discussion.
From all the studies available on multiple negation, Jespersen's account is no doubt the most complete, thorough and illustrative. He first refers to cases where negation expresses a positive meaning (e.g. not without some doubt), and then he explains what he calls «cumulative negation» or structures of double negatives as they are found in present-day non-standard English (such as He didn't find nothing). In his view, the existence of these constructions may be explained by the emotional character of repeated negation. As a separate variety of multiple negation he treated what might be called «resumptive negation». This is especially frequent when not is followed by a disjunctive combination with neither…nor or a restrictive addition with not even: «he cannot sleep neither at night nor in the daytime» or «he cannot sleep, not even after taking an opiate». A special case of «resumptive negation» is seen when not is softened down by an added hardly, which in itself would have been sufficient to express the idea: «He wasn’t changed at all hardly» (R. Kipling).
Closely connected with «resumptive negation» is paratactic negation: a negative is placed in a clause dependant on a verb of negative import, e.g «deny, forbid, hinder, doubt», as if the clause had been an independent sentence, or as if the corresponding positive verb had been used in the main sentence, e.g. «It never occurred to me to doubt that your work… would not advance our common object in the highest degree».
To speak about «resumptive negation», it is a second class of emphatic negation comprises, the characteristic of which is that after a negative sentence has been completed, something is added in a negative form with the obvious result that the negative result is heightened….In its pure form, the supplementary negative is added outside the frame of the first sentence, generally as an afterthought, as in ‘I shall never do it, not under any circumstances, not on any condition, neither at home nor abroad’, etc.
This type of negation can be divided into three categories:
Type I:
(1) a. He cannot sleep, neither at night nor in the daytime.
b. He cannot sleep, not even after taking an opiate.
c. He has no money, not so much as a dime
d. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Type II
The second type is not cited by Jespersen or Van der Wouden (as a separate type), nor elsewhere, except among a listing of types of «multiple negations’ in (Lawler 1977):
(2) a. I can’t go to the party, not with my clothes looking like this.
b. No, you may not borrow the car, not without doing your homework first.
c. You won’t be offered the job, not if I have anything to do with it.
d. I don’t have time to meet with you, not this afternoon anyway.
e. Would you use a shotgun to kill an elephant? Not and live to tell about it.
f. Can linguists study negation? Not and stay sane they can’t. (Lawler)
Type III
(3) That isn’t really legal, I don’t believe.
Type III is different from types I and II in that the second negated phrase contains a propositional attitude verb, and the proposition expressed by the main clause plays the role, semantically, of the object of that verb. Types I and II have no propositional attitude verb in the second phrase; rather, that phrase most resembles an adjunct to the main clause. (Dowty, 2008)
Jespersen (1940:451), referring to the double (or treble) attraction, states that «in Elizabethan English this particular kind of repeated negation is comparatively rare, while the «resumptive accumulation» is frequent».
On the other hand, Iyeiri (2001:128, 138, 142), whose major concern is Middle English, classifies multiple negation into the following three types:
Type I multiple negation with the negative adverb ne (ne…not)
Nare noman ells dead ne sic ne unsele (Poema Morale, 201)
Type II multiple negation with conjunctive ne/nor
Ne ƥu ne cumest noʒt in Scotlonde (The Owl and the Nightingale, 908)
Type III multiple negation with the combination of not, neither, never, no, ets.
Ne neuer shal none be/born fairer than she (Reynard the Fox, 79/8)
As an overall conclusion, Iyeiri (2001:155) remarks that «muchof the declining process of multiple negation, in fact, takes place during the Middle English period».
Seright's(1966) study is much more restricted than Jespersen's. He confines himself to the analysis of standard double negative constructions, such as It is not inconceivable or It is not impossible. These sentences contain a negative verb or clause negation followed by a case of local negation, inconceivable and impossible, which constitute two examples of morphological or affixal negation. In his view, numerous instances of such standard double-negative constructions can be found and, in contrast to the examples typical of non-standard English such as They don't do nothing, they are generally «limited to the speech of the educated» (Seright, 1966:123). Mention is also made of sequences such as Not to mash nor break the grains, which contain a negative correlative conjunctive. Seright(1966) insists that the use of double negatives of this type is quite wide. (Palacios Martinez, 2001:480)
Rissanen (1999:272) observes that multiple negation was common in the sixteenth century. It must be noted here that Rissanen's definition of multiple negation is broad, as is evident from the four examples he gives:
(1) They cowd not fynd no londe at iiij score fadom (Torkington, 62)
(2) that the Capper nor none other persone shalnot take by hym self or any other persone to his use… (Statutes, III 34)
(3) I am not asham'd of my Name–nor my Face neither. (Vanbrugh, II.III)
(4) that no woman has; nor neuer none Shall mistris be of it, (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, III.I)
Baker (1970) analyses what he calls «logical double sentences». From the perspective of the generative theory of that time, he formulates a polarity-reversal rule to explain the grammaticality of sentences such as There isn 't anyone in this camp who wouldn't rather be in Montpelier. The polarity-reversal rule operates on the cycle of the subordinate clause as it changes the derivational feature associated with would rather to [+ negative]. Its operation on the cycle of the main clause changes the polarity of would rather from [+ negative] to [– negative] and the polarity of anyone from [– negative] to [+ negative]. Attention is also paid to what he defines as pseudo-negative sentences, that is, verbal complements found with predicates such as surprised, disappointed, relieved, glad, sorry, lucky, odd or strange, which provide suitable environments for any, ever, and other elements normally required in negative contexts (e.g. We're surprised that anyone bought anything at all; John is sorry that anything happened; It's strange that anyone could solve the mystery in such short order). (Palacios Martinez, 2001:481)
Horn (1991), for his part, discusses the expression of litotes by means of double negative constructions. By litotes is meant the «a two-component structure in which two negations are joined to give a positive evaluation. Thus «not unkindly» actually means «kindly», though the positive effect is weakened and some lack of the speaker's confidence in his statement is implied. The first component of a litotes is always the negative particle «not», while the second, always negative in semantics, varies in form from a negatively affixed word (as above) to a negative phrase.
Litotes is especially expressive when the semantic centre of the whole structure is stylistically or/and emotionally coloured, as in the case of the following occasional creations: «Her face was not unhandsome» (A.H.) or «Her face was not unpretty».
The function of litotes has much in common with that of understatement – both weaken the effect of the utterance. The uniqueness of litotes lies in its specific «double negative» structure and in its weakening only the positive evaluation.
Pragmatically, the use of double negatives as in «It's not impossible» may be justified, according to Horn, by a series of motivations: politeness (the speaker does not want to commit oneself to a particular option), irony (the speaker acts as if hesitant or unsure on purpose), weight or impressiveness of style (the speaker intends to convey formality to the interlocutor), absence of corresponding positive (there is no word to refer to the opposite term), parallelism of structure (a similar construction was used before), quality (the speaker is neither sure nor unsure about what is being said) and minimisation of processing (in contexts of direct rebuttal or contradiction as a reply to a previous assertion).
Finally, Wouden (1997) devotes part three of his book on negative contexts to the study of multiple negation in different languages. For this scholar the addition of a negative to an already negative construction may lead to the following possibilities: (I) the structure containing various negatives may be
equivalent to a single one as in some varieties of sub-standard English, e.g. I didn 't see nobody nowhere; (II) the two negatives may weaken each other as in the case of litotes above, e.g. She's not an unattractive woman; (III) the two negatives cancel each other out as in logic, giving as result no negation, e.g. Neighbours should not be uncooperative; and (IV) the two negatives intensify each other, e.g. He never stops working, not even at Christmas. As can be easily gathered from the previous account, Wouden's analysis of multiple negation is mainly semantic rather than syntactic; the following taxonomy of multiple negation is derived from each of the four possibilities explained above: (I) negative concord, (II) litotes, (III) denial and (IV) emphatic negation. (Palacios Martinez, 2001:481–482)
3. Analysis of Maylory’s Morte Darthur
The term «multiple negation» or «double negation» are often used ambiguously. Thus, for example they may be taken to refer to sentences like Not many of the boys didn’t talk to John, as in McCawley (1973:206). Though this is unmistakably a negative sentence, its effect is quite the opposite, the force for the assertion having been somewhat weakened by the use of two negatives instead of a straightforward affirmative (cf. Jespersen 1940:449). In popular terms, the negative in this sentence «cancel each other out» and are interpreted as a resulting positive, as in logic or mathematics. Seright (1966:124) suggested that the use of this tipe of multiple negation, which included constructions like it is not unlikely that…, is characteristic of educated usage; according to Patridge (1971:88) it is a type of construction peculiar to literary English.
Alternatively, the terms are used to describe negative sentences with more than one negative in which the negatives do not cancel each other out. For this type of negation Joly adopts the term «compound negation», as opposed to «simple negation».
Such sentences as example of which might be I ain’t got no time for no liquor (J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye 1975:88, Penguin), are negative in meaning irrespective of the actual number of negatives they contain, because the negatives together serve to negate the sentences in which they occur.In contrast to the first type of multiple negation, which is often referred to as «logical», Seright observes that the second type is found only in «the uncultivated speech» ofthe uneducated (1966:123). «Hie same point of view is found in Quirk et al, (1985:799), who distinguish between the two types of double negation by identifying the first type with Standard English and the second with non-standard English. Though double negation is undeniably a feature of non-standard English, of both British and American English dialects,it also occurs in certain forms of the standard. Both types of multiple negation occur in the Morte Dathur, though the former is considerably less frequent than the latter. Here are the examples of the logical type of multiple negation:
(1) For I dere say there is no knight in this contrey that is nat in Arthures court that dare do batayle wyth sir Blamour de Ganys (220.3–4)
(2) Had nat ye bene, we had nat loste sir Trystram (282.17–18)
(3)… they founde nother man, nother woman that he ne was dede by the vengeaunce of Oure Lorde (493.37)
It goes without saying that the two types of construction do not happily coexist, particularly in a written text. After all, they each require a completely different interpretation, the one with a positive the otherwith a negative result. In the spoken language, no such problems exist As Labov (l972a:146) remarks: «When anunderlying double negative [i.e. with a positive meaning] is intended, speakers of nonstandard dialects use the same device as speakers of standard English: heavy stress on both negatives», Naturally, such a disambiguating device is not available in the written language. While the second type of multiple negation has been found since the Old English period, the rareness in the Morte Darthur of the first type of construction suggests that the logical type of multiple negation is a later development in the system of English negation.
To begin with, this definition lacks precision in that it covert a number of negative constructions which are not strictly speaking instances of multiple negation. To illustrate this point the following examples may be cited from the Morte Darthur
(4) for there was nother kynge, cayser, nother knyght that day (C 216.21:22)
(5) and ye shall have no shame nor velony (C 140.22)
(6) and woldyst never be made neyssh nother by watir nother by fyre (C 446.25–26)
Strictly speaking, all three instances would be covered by Barber’s definition – «two or more negative words are used to negate the sentence; these negatives do not cancel each other out». Even so, in a modernised form (4) would be fully acceptable in formal standard English today. It might be paraphrased as «for there was neither king, emperor nor knight that day…» (cf. Quirk et al. 1985:763 and 938).
Example (5) would likewise be acceptable in present-day standard English, though instead of no, neither would normally be used: «and you will have neither shame nor villainy» (cf. Quirk et al. 1985:938). According to Seright (1966:125), the construction would have to be rephrased as «and you will not have either shame or villainy» in order to be fully acceptable.
Example (6) is belonging to the category of resumptive negation. The negative effect in sentences like this is heightened, and the function of the tag seems to that of an afterthought which simultaneously emphasises the negation.
(7) that by no meany I can nat put her fro me (C 525.37–38)
(8) that he sholde never do none inchauntemente uppon hir (C 93.18)
(9) and horse ne harneyse gettvst thou none of myne (C 164.24–25)
(10) but in no wyse he wolde nat juste no more (C 303.17–18)
(11) yette woll I nat wyghte my lady to be in no joupardye (C 94.35–36)