Performing a flying fuck

At our students' graduations this week, a colleague told me about a (non-canonical) ballet step which, because of the particular way that it's performed, is called the Flying Fuck. 

(As an aside, we had a conversation about how many of the names of dance steps are bodily, sexual or generally risqué, something that is also true of one of the types of dance that I do.)

So as you probably know, there is an expression, I don't give a flying fuck. It means that you don't care at all. For anyone who's using this blog to learn English (ill-advisadly, maybe), it's pretty rude so go carefully. 

In this expression, a flying fuck is what linguists would call a Negative Polarity Item or NPI. These are words that don't sound grammatical in a sentence without a 'licensor', often a negation, hence the name. So we can say (1) but not (2), where there is no negative word in the sentence to license the NPI and it sound really weird: 

(1) I don't give a flying fuck about his career prospects. 

(2) *I give a flying fuck about his career prospects. 

There are actually more licensors than just negation. Lots of NPIs can be licensed by expressions like exactly two. We can see this with another NPI, any: 

(3) *Some people have eaten any salad. 

(4) Exactly two people have eaten any salad. 

NPIs are tricksy and puzzling. There are several different theories to explain why they work the way they do, all of which are appealing in some way, and none of which quite satisfy completely. For example, some theories of how NPIs work predicted that flying fuck would not be licensed by exactly, as it's what is sometimes known as a 'minimiser', but it actually sounds ok to me: 

(5) Exactly two people give a flying fuck about his career prospects. 

I think this fact would be predicted under what seems to me to be the most widely-accepted (current) idea, however, which is known as 'non-veridicality' and is essentially about (4) being more specific than (3), though in more technical terms than that. 

But especially interesting to me is the fact that because this is the name of a ballet step, the exact same expression can completely lose its NPI status, and doesn't need licensing at all: 

(6) They performed a perfect flying fuck.

(7) The dance opens with a flying fuck. 

I like this sort of almost-literal interpretation of the expression to repurpose it for the name, at which point it becomes just a bog-standard phrase like any other. 

The literature on this is very fun to read, by the way, because it's full of phrases like I don't give a flying fuck so I recommend it. 

It ain't nothin'

I've talked about 'double negation' before, by which I really mean negative concord: using two negative elements in one clause to give a single negative meaning. I've pointed out how it makes no sense to argue against it on the grounds of it being illogical (it isn't), and I usually say that in context, you can always understand what the speaker means. That's more or less true in speech, when you have intonation to help you out. But in writing, without that clue, sometimes the context isn't quite enough. I found this example in a friend's facebook post:

15 days in jail, which ain't nothin'. 

The context really didn't tell me if 15 days was a lot or not much for the crime in question, and so without the intonational cues (in my crude non-expert terms, whether you'd give stress to both ain't and nothin' or just to nothin') I couldn't tell if he meant that 15 days was a significant time, or that 15 days was nothing at all.

The logical Cantonese

Post number 3 from The Leopard! What good value that book was.

Now, here's a nice example of linguistic FACT being used to propagate linguistic SILLINESS. Kaja asks Harry Hole a negative question, You don't take milk, do you?. There follows the kind of misunderstanding we have all the bleeding time in English, because English is ambiguous in its answers here: he answers Yes, meaning 'yes, that's true, I don't take milk', but she thinks he means 'yes, I do take milk'. The fact that English can even do this is unusual and interesting and a worthy object of study, but we'll leave it aside for now (I think I've written about it before anyway).

Languages differ with respect to how they confirm the truth of a negative question. English is confused and can answer yes (= yes, that's true, I don't take milk) or no (= no, I don't take milk). Most languages pick one or the other. Cantonese, which Hole is familiar with because he's been living in Hong Kong, confirms the truth with yes (= yes, that's true, I don't take milk). Kaja says, when Harry uses this strategy, that he's "stopped using double negatives". I assume by this she means that he doesn't echo the negation in the proposition, answering No, I don't take milk. This isn't what we normally mean by a double negative, but it's the way Norwegian (the original language of the book and the characters' language) confirms the truth of a negative proposition.

It's not more logical to do it the Cantonese way, though. I'm not sure why it would be considered to be so, and in any case, languages are not logical. They're messy and arbitrary(ish) and when there's two options, as in this case, they're just one or the other without one being more logical. If there was a good reason for doing it one way, all languages would do it that way.

I got all this information from the brilliant SSWL database, by the way, where you can read more about this and other syntactic facts to your heart's content.

No deal is better than a bad deal

My friend Michelle reminded me that Theresa May said this back in January, and has kept on saying it since then. Most people have been non-pedantic enough to let it go by without comment (after all, there's enough politics happening for us to talk about) but she, I and Chris Maslanka in the Guardian all noticed that it was ambiguous.

Negation, as I've mentioned in previous posts, is usually ambiguous because it takes scope over different bits of the sentence it's in. Here's Chris Maslanka's explanation of the two meanings:

Incidentally, there's a long bit in Alice Through The Looking Glass (or the other one) where a messenger pouts that 'nobody walks faster than I do' and the king says 'he can't, or he'd be here already'. Lewis Carroll was keen on logic and semantics jokes.

After some back and forth with my colleague (& friend) Christina, we think we've translated the two meanings into what looks like gibberish to non-linguists, but is actually a formal representation of the meaning. The notation explains how the bits of the sentence interact to give two different meanings from the same set of words in the same order. I've translated them underneath into increasingly more idiomatic English.

The meaning Theresa means, presumably, is this:

∀x∀y.[NO.DEAL(x) & BAD.DEAL(y) -> x > y]

(Roughly,

"For all x and for all y, if x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "If x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "Having no deal at all is better than having a bad deal".)

Whereas the meaning that's much more salient to me, and which made the sentence seem quite bizarre, is this one:

 ~∃x.[DEAL(x) & ∃y.[BAD.DEAL(y) & x > y] ]

(Roughly,

"There is no x such that x is a deal and there is some y such that y is a bad deal and x is better than y"
or "There is no deal which is better than a bad deal"
or "A bad deal is the best deal".)

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that this particular type of negation scope ambiguity is regional - it seems less obvious to US speakers (see this post and the comments). But that's a purely anecdotal observation so do let me know if you have anecdata to add to that.

That's not a dumb question, innit

In my MA syntax class this week we were talking about innit and how it's going from being a tag question to a kind of discourse particle.

Tag questions (aren't we?, don't you?, won't she?) have the following properties (among others):

1. They follow the main clause 
2. They have the form of a question
3. They contain an auxiliary verb that matches the one in the main clause or is do (are, do and will in the examples above)
4. The verb agrees in person and number with the main clause verb (e.g. 1st person plural, 2nd person singular or plural, and 3rd person singular in the examples above)
5. They have the opposite polarity to the main clause (so they're often negative, following a positive main clause, but can be positive if the main clause is negated: He's not coming, is he?) (though see NB below)
6. They have a pronoun that matches the main clause subject (we, you, she above)

Isn't it is a form of tag question, then: it has all the above properties in an example like It's a funny old world, isn't it?. But in some dialects, it has crept out of these constraints and is used in a broader range of contexts, and as well as losing a lot of its phonological properties (it's reduced to innit), some of the syntactic properties in 1-6 no longer apply to it.

1: It still follows the main clause. But that's about it.

2: It may not have the form of a question. Lots of times, it's written without a question mark (OK, that's no guarantee, but it's telling). It's attached to sentences that can't possibly be questioned, like assertions on the part of the speaker: You're fit, innit. That's the speaker's opinion. How can it be questioned?

3: The verb probably doesn't match the main clause one now - in the example I just gave, it does, but you can also say I've got no money, innit, where it doesn't.

4, 6: We no longer need the agreement in person and number. In We're late, innit, the verb in the main clause is first person plural. Innit, if it comes from isn't it, is 3rd person singular. Similarly, the pronoun is it rather than the matching one in the main clause, we.

5: Generally, the polarity is opposite to that in the main clause, but only by chance: innit is negative, and more sentences are positive than negative. But I heard an example on Gogglebox this week of a negative clause followed by supposedly negative innit:

That's not actually a dumb question, innit. 

Cool, innit?

NB: Tag questions can have the same polarity as the main clause if they're both positive, but it has a different meaning. Compare: 
a. That's the bus we need to get, isn't it? 
b. That's the bus we need to get, is it? 
In a, the speaker thinks they have the correct information and wants their interlocutor to confirm it. In b, the speaker thinks that the interlocutor has the relevant information, and wants to confirm it. But we don't find negative assertions and negative tags:
*That's not the bus we need to get, isn't it? 

Don't you not want some points?

On this week's episode of QI (available on the iPlayer for a few days if you're in the UK), Sandi Toksvig asked Alan Davies the following question:

Don't you not want some points or not? 

The point of QI, if you don't know, is that the questions are all kind of a trick. In this case, the trick is that it's hard to work out what the right answer is, and there's a penalty for a wrong answer.

This question brought about some linguistic chat, all of which ended with Sandi saying that only 'arbitrary pedants' would worry about double negatives, and explaining why the stigma came about in the first place. Gyles Brandreth also took the opportunity to tell us at length how English has half a million words and German only a hundred thousand (I guess it depends how you count them).

But the point here is the difficulty of the piled-up negatives, of course. Let's dispense with the easy one first: the or not at the end caused both Alan Davies and Victoria Coren to claim that it wasn't a yes or no question: it's two questions. WELL. This is technically true, it is two questions, but as I discuss at length in my thesis (and as is generally known; it's not my idea), this is actually one question because yes/no questions are a choice between two alternatives. So that's OK. We can in theory give a yes or no answer to this question. So which is the right one, assuming that you do want points?

WE DON'T KNOW! That's one of the cool things about this question and it's not even because of the double negative! It's because negative questions are inherently ambiguous! Look:

Don't you want some points?
No (I don't want some points)
Yes (??)

We don't always really have a clear sense of what 'yes' means in answer to a negative question. Probably, you feel that it means yes, I do want some points in this case. I do. But it's got to have the right intonation otherwise it doesn't mean anything much, though it can't mean that I don't want points, I don't think.

Do you not want some points?
No (I don't want some points)
Yes (??)

Again, it's not clear, without a sort of contradictory emphasis, what this means. There's tons of research on this which you can read if you're interested. Kramer & Rawlins use examples like the following to show that in fact, the interpretation is likely to be negative in such questions:

Is Alfonso not coming to the party?
No (=he isn't coming)
Yes (=he isn't coming)

So we've already got an issue with this kind of negation. Adding in a double negation, as in the original question, just adds parsing difficulty to the already ambiguous question. It is a real double negative, so it cancels out, as in I don't not like him... or is it double negation as found in many varieties, where one reinforces the other, as in I didn't do nothing or Didn't you not? We just don't know.

What, you thought I was going to answer this one? Nope. Unsolved problem, my friends.

(The 'correct' answer was yes, which is actually not what I'd have gone for: I'd have said it meant something like Isn't it the case that you don't want some points, or is that wrong?, so I'd have answered No, that's not the case. But maybe they went with yes as in Yes, that's true, it isn't the case that....)

Can you not?

I've written before about negation and the difference in meaning when it takes different scope. The other day, a friend in the pub said this, directed at a football 'pundit' on telly:

You're 60, can you not wear a suit and trainers? 

By this, he meant

Because you're 60 [and should know better/are too old], please don't wear a suit and trainers. 

It can have another meaning, though, and one that I think is much more accessible, or perhaps only available, in certain dialects:

You're 60, so is it impossible for you to wear a suit and trainers?

For me, both those readings work fine for the sentence and the intonation is pretty much the same in each case. The difference is once again a matter of how 'high' the negation is in the sentence:

Is it the case that
you can
[not wear a suit and trainers]?

vs

Is it not the case that
you can
[wear a suit and trainers]?

For more on this, a very easy to read article (old now, but still good) is Bob Ladd's 1981 paper.

You never got in the market

I was watching a programme about Spitalfields market. A man, aged probably in his early 60s, who had worked there his whole life, was talking about how you got a job there in the early days:

If you never knew anyone, you never got in the market. 

This illustrates a characteristic of many non-standard varieties of English: the use of never as a past tense negator instead of as a negative temporal adverb. Jenny Cheshire describes this as a difference between referring to universal time (the not ever meaning) versus a particular point in time (the not meaning). I'll not say more about this here because if I start trying to summarise it all, that's my day gone, as I find it so interesting. But suffice it to say that if you look it up there's a ton of research on it, and much of it pretty accessible to a non-linguist.

The location of 'not'

I overheard an interesting conversation on the train this weekend. One man was telling his friend about 'the most racist moment ever on live television'. It went approximately like this (and I don't know what TV programme it was - he'd seen it on the internet):

On a television programme, some people had to choose who to give the money to out of a couple of women, a black man, and someone else of some ethnic minority (the speaker thought 'maybe Hawaiian'). Someone on this programme apparently said of the black man,

'I don't think he should get the money because he's black'. 

He apparently followed up with some justification about it giving ethnic minorities a bad name, 'always playing the victim'.

This is not great however you spin it, but there are actually (at least) two interpretations, and one is way worse than the other. It has to do with what's called the 'scope' of the negation. In other words, what is it that's negated here?

One meaning is something like this: 'I think that this man should not get the money, and the reason I think that is because he is black and I'm against black people being given money'. On this interpretation, the speaker simply doesn't want the black man to get the money.

The other is something like 'I don't think that this man should get the money simply by virtue of his being black, because racial discrimination is a bad thing even if it's positive discrimination'. On this interpretation, the speaker may decide that the black man should get the money for some other reason, but doesn't think his race should be the criterion for making the decision.

We can see what's going on if I write out those paraphrases using some formal phrasing 'it is the case that', which means something like 'the following is true', and put each part of the sentence on a new line:

It is the case that
I think that
he should not get it because he is black

It is not the case that
I think that
he should get it because he is black

You can see that the not, which I emboldened in the examples above, is in a different place in each one.

In the first one, the negation is part of the 'lowest' level of embedding and only negates the 'getting the money' situation: he should not get the money because he is black. The higher levels tell us that the speaker does indeed believe this (negated) proposition.

In the second one, the negation is 'higher up' - it negates the whole situation of the speaker thinking something. The lowest level is the proposition that he should get the money because he is black, and the not tells us that speaker does not believe this.

Maybe it's hard to follow this if you just read it through, but if you think about the two paraphrases you'll probably find you have these same two interpretations. I leave you with a joke that requires a similar scope-of-negation ambiguity:

A newly-wed couple are leaving for their honeymoon. The man says to the woman, 'Would you have married me if my father hadn't left me a fortune?', to which she replies, 'Darling, I'd have married you no matter who had left you a fortune'. 

LAGB 2012, and random observations

I'm at the annual LAGB meeting, held in Salford this year. Yesterday we had a workshop on Case, and indeed case (there's a difference). 

I really enjoyed the plenary talk, by Mark Baker. He had used what's called The Middle Way, which is a good methodology if you can do it. It means that you find a middle ground between your typical theoretical generative linguist (who looks at just one or two languages, often their own) and your typical functional or typological linguist (who looks at a lot of languages but not in great detail, and maybe only from published grammars) and you take a sample of unrelated languages and you look at them in as much detail as you can, ideally from primary data. It's what I wanted to do with my thesis but in practice, it's really really hard to do because you need to find native speakers of all these obscure languages. And that's before you even get to interpreting all the data. I won't summarise his talk here because it was excellent and I won't do it justice, and because you can get the slides here: [link]

On a completely unrelated note, he used this sentence, which I consider to be slightly ungrammatical (that's what the ? means - linguists, at least those who don't do quantitative stuff, use a scale of ungrammaticality. * means it's ungrammatical, ? means a bit iffy, and then ?* in between for a totally subjective and non-quantifiable scale of badness. Grammatical sentences are just presented as sentences):

(1) ? You do nothing in the transitive one either.

'Either' (in this sense) is a sort of NPI, which means it's allowed if you have a negative which 'scopes' over it, but not if you don't. So (2) is not at all grammatical:

(2) *I like hornpipes either.

The 'nothing' in the sentence Baker used should be enough to license 'either', and evidently for him it is. And for me, it's totally OK to say something like (3):

(3) There's nothing in here either.

That's completely parallel, on the face of it. There's no reason that I can see that one should be OK and the other not. And yet, for mysterious reasons, for me it's a heck of a lot better to say (4) than (1), but (5) is no better, and probably a bit less natural, than (3):

(4) You don't do anything in the transitive one either.

(5) There isn't anything in here either. 

Answers on a postcard please. 

As if!

You probably know the expression, as if. It's used to show incredulity, in a kind of negative way. Sort of scoffing. So you can say,

As if he's ever going to get a girlfriend!

And what you mean is that he hasn't a hope in hell of getting a girlfriend. You can also use it on its own, like in the film Clueless: As if!


But like all colloquial phrases, its usage is shifting. I noticed that I use it like this:

As if I know what we're doing yet.  

As if I have sat nav.

It signifies something that we both know isn't true and is a faintly ridiculous suggestion. I'm almost scoffing at my interlocutor for suggesting it. My sister, however, uses it like this:

As if you can't eat bread and stuff? 

As if he doesn’t pass that on, does he even know?

It doesn't help that both the examples I could find in emails from her contain a negative element, whereas mine are affirmative. But she's definitely not scoffing; she's more just exclaiming and engaging in mutual feeling (so she's sympathising in the first one, and joining me in being outraged in the second).

But the main difference is that the propositions are true, in hers, but mine are false. As if I have sat nav means (It's not true that) I have sat nav, but As if he doesn't pass that on doesn't mean (It's not true that) he doesn't pass that on. It was said when he actually didn't pass it on. It's gone from being a negator (the grammaticality of yet in the first example proves it is, as you can't have yet in an affirmative sentence) to being an intensifier of sorts, used to make the proposition it's attached to more emphatic.

Urban Dictionary says that you can use it just to draw attention to something (true):

Cassie: Are you going to LeedsFest this year?
Jordyn: As if I can't go to LeedsFest! HATE THAT!

This is even more extreme, as in this exchange as if is attached to new information which has not previously been mentioned/known by both parties. In all of the other cases, it's attached to given (recently discussed or already-known) information (echoed information, often, so that the proposition has just been uttered by the other person before the as if expression that echoes it). In this last example, it's attached to the answer to a question asked by 'Cassie', who does not yet know the answer, so it must necessarily be new information.