April 17, 2007

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