Total undernegation
We often remark here on instances of
OVERNEGATION, in
which there are two places where negation could be marked in a
sentence, and the speaker or writer chooses them both: for instance, in
"It's hard not to read this and not shout 'Guilty as hell'", commented on by
Ben Zimmer
here.
But there are also cases of
UNDERNEGATION, in which
there are two places negation could be marked in a sentence, and the
speaker or writer chooses neither; Ben gave some examples of a distinct
but related sort (where two negative elements are called for but only
one is produced) in a posting
here.
Here's a lovely negation-free example, from a flyer for a talk by
Stephen Palmer (Psychology, Berkeley) at Stanford last Thursday, under
the auspices of the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program:
Aesthetic
Science: Oxymoron or a New Branch of Cognitive Science?
Artists of all stripes continually face the problem of how to compose
their works in aesthetically pleasing ways. Despite its
importance and generality, the perceptual basis of aesthetic response
has received adequate empirical attention. Prof. Palmer will
report the results of a series of experiments that investigate people's
aesthetic responses to spatial and color composition.
This is what happens if you have a choice between negation with
not (or
n't) --
... the perceptual basis of aesthetic
response has not/hasn't
received adequate empirical attention.
and affixal negation --
... the perceptual basis of aesthetic
response has received
inadequate empirical attention.
and fail to notice that you've picked neither one. The
sentence-initial modifier with
despite
will clue readers in to the writer's intentions, but it might take a
bit of time for them to work that out.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at April 17, 2007 01:38 PM