But officer I wasn't not going that fast

I was looking for good scenery but traffic and the Iowan landscape made pictures difficult. When Buffy started impatiently tailgating an enormous truck I shook loose from my fear and noticed some writing. She got more than close enough for me to make out the message so I got the camera out and snapped this picture.

It's a little hazy. I didn't have time to get a really good shot. By the time I was able to get the focus and framing right Buffy was flooring it and passing semi.

As I understand the message it means that driving 55 mph is too slow to ensure that the produce will be fresh when it finally arrives. So the driver has to go faster than 55.

It's more evidence of negative concord in PdE. That slash-circle is the visual equivalent of a negative morpheme. In some English dialects it would have to be silent in order to avoid further semantic content: It isn't fresh at 55. But in other dialects we can imagine the negative working for emphasis.

FOREMAN: Them potatoes better be fresh. And you better not get no speeding ticket on the way here!
DRIVER: It ain't gonna be fresh at no 55 miles an hour!

I've seen instances of this visual negative concord before. Remember the Red Rocker? His shirts are still out there on eBay.

No more not on negative concord

An earlier post made reference to the following lines spoken by Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

Note the negative concord. To rewrite it as Ms B my junior high grammar teacher would suggest we then have to choose which negative to change. Which is better?

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is movd...
or
The man that hath no music in himself and is not mov'd...?

Of course the rhythm requirements would only allow the second version -- which still isn't as good as Shakespeare's.

The use of nor to as a negative on the verb phrase is a stretch of the common rule for a coordinated negative that does not change (ie reverse) the semantics of a previous negative. Think of the neither...nor rule. As that rule is usually applied the two negated words/phrases function as the same part of speech.

NOMINAL
Neither borrower nor lender be.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat...

VERBAL
I can neither read nor write.
I neither agree nor disagree.
We will neither retreat nor surrender.

ADJECTIVAL
He is neither kind nor honest.
That's neither here nor there.

PREPOSITIONAL
I work neither for them nor with them.

etc

Occasionally this coordination jumps categories. Sometimes it's a very awkward union as in I have neither friends nor have enemies. That sentence sounds weird partly because the first "neither" negates the noun "friends" and the corresponding "nor" applies to the verb "have". But it's probably mostly because the second "have" sounds repetitive. Consider the following that has a similar non-parallel structure but avoids the repetition: I have neither friends nor do I want any. Not a great sentence but it's okay.

Correlating an adjective with a verb sounds fine too: She was neither present nor did we expect her.

And without the "neither" (which does have the power of suggesting a parallel structure) A sentence like No one called nor did they write is barely noticeable in its non-parallel form. The "nor" coordinates a negated verb with a negative quantifier, not with another verb. But it sounds fine to me.

As we pick up this argument that negative concord has not lost its place in the underlying form of English, support comes from some situations in which two negatives are not proscribed by even the most staunch advocate of mathematical logic. Consider the following exchanges.

Speaker A: You don't think Carrot Top is funny?!
Speaker 2: No.

Speaker 3: Are you going to the game?
Speaker D: No, I don't think I'll make it.

Let's play with the second example.

Speaker 3: Are you going to the game?
Speaker D: Yes, I don't think I'll make it.

Here we see that the opening is probably a single word response to the question. And to the question "are you going" (derived from the statement you are going) the proper response in this case is a simple "No." We could even argue that what follows is a separate sentence not commanded by the single word response. Maybe.

In the first exchange the speaker wants to affirm the statement that she doesn't like the prop-comic. Consider how this would sound:

Speaker A: You don't think Carrot Top is funny?!
Speaker 2: Yes.

The intention of the yes/no response is to paraphrase one of two answers. Either "Your statement is true" or "your statement is false." Although the response is to an interrogative, not a declarative, so it gets muddy. But whether the question is a surprised "You think he's funny" or "You don't think he's funny" the answer is the same: "No" (for anyone with integrity).

Finally let's turn to an example from a horrible show that was not put down soon enough. Heard on The Class during the obligatory hook-up scene between two main characters:

He: "This means nothing."

She: "It better not!"

I will rest on this simple claim. The intention of the second speaker is ambiguous. In Standard English she could be hoping that it means either 'something' or 'nothing.' Agreeing with him or correcting him. For this ambiguity to exist there must be an underlying form that is sometimes realized in the phonetic form and sometimes is not.

Aren't all jokes linguistic?

Revisiting double negatives: this time in joke form. Two people told me this joke today. One attributed it to Garrison Keillor; the other attributed it to a Purdue professor. My guess is Keillor told the joke this weekend and it is now making the rounds in English and linguistics departments.

A linguistics professor stood in front of his class and began his lecture on double negatives: "In the English language it is well known that two negatives equal a positive. This is not the case in every language. In some languages two negatives equal a negative. There is however not a single known language in which two positives equal a negative!"

A cynical student in the back row crossed his arms and muttered "Yeah right."

Might double negatives not be such a no-no anymore?

The double negative is one of those forms that many prescriptivists believe can be decried on 'logical' grounds. J.E. Metcalfe says in The right way to improve your English, "'different to' is wrong simply because it is illogical." And the argument against a double negative denying a positive uses the same appeal to logic and mathematics to say that one negative cancels out the other. So "I didn't see nothin'" 'logically' means that I did see something. This argument has been made long enough to have elicited a counter. Language isn't math. Other languages use the double negative. English previously used the double negative. People still understand the intention of the phrase, etc.

Here some prescriptivists like to bring aesthetics into their corner. In his attempt to chart the territory between descriptivism and prescriptivism, Alex Rose writes

It’s the difference between playing a scale and playing a sonata; between eating for nourishment and eating for pleasure. One way gets the job done, the other gets it done well.

Why do so many prescriptivists think descriptivists are unaware of eloquence. Is my writing plain. Is it very plain. And is it boring. Is it really boring?

So some will claim that a phrase like I don't have nothin' more to say just isn't eloquent. Or at least it doesn't communicate culture and education as well as I don't have anything more to say. Better yet would be I have nothing more to say.

I'll get to the point. Some double negative forms are marked and easily noticed even though they occur in casual standard English. These are forms that we would not expect to find in writing. Certainly not in formal writing. But some double negative forms are making their way into standard speech and even writing unnoticed. Just this morning I heard an articulate speaker on the radio say "I wouldn't be surprised if we don't find [this] out later," meaning, as I gathered from his tone and the context of his claim, that he expects that yes, we will eventually come to the realization. This is sometimes called "overnegation." It has been discussed on Language Log several times.

In one post Mark Liberman asks, "Could (some) overnegations in English be a formal residue of a stubborn hankering for negative concord?" I like the question. It's a nice retreat from his initial conclusion (oxymoron?) that this form is "not a dialect form or an idiom, it's just a mistake."

Of course the argument for a mistake based on confusion is nicely supported by the common use of multiple negation to deliberately clutter and entangle a claim or question. Now I can't remember the exact wording, but I remember the end of one episode of Cheers when Diane vowed to say "no" to any question Sam asked, and he quickly asked her if there was any way she would not object to not going to bed with him.

Where are those online scripts when you need them?

[Update: The Language Guy has just written a post about Nonapologies Apologies. Commenting on Richard Nixon's resignation apology TLG writes "Notice that 'any injuries that may have been done' does not concede that any injuries were done. If none were not done, why would he need to resign?" (emphasis mine)

I may be trusting my ear too much here but it doesn't sound like a deliberate affectation to me. I include this example not to show that knowledgeable linguists make mistakes too. Better illustrated, I believe, is the increasing acceptability, or decreasing markedness, of double negatives in standard and even written English.

further Update:

Who needs a script? I was just watching my daily dose of reruns and the episode of Cheers came on. As Diane plays coy promising to answer either 'yes' or 'no' in whatever way will reject Sam's advances he teasingly asks "Is there any way that you would not object to not going to bed with me?"

Apparently my memory's still okay.]