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by notahacker
4823 days ago
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In this case, those attempting to standardize English grammar decided double negation should be used to achieve subtle shades of positive (as in Italian) rather than negative emphasis (as in Catalan) so double negatives are not conveying nothing (unlike in French or Castilian where the standard extra negative no comunica nada). Perhaps the divergence between the Romance languages is more immediately surprising... What's interesting is that normal use of negation seems to have changed over time within many individual languages, repeatedly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle
which is perhaps part of the reason why the AAVE double negative has so many parallels in British regional dialects and the writings of Chaucer |
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