Negation can be a tricky thing, as has been discussed many times here on Language Log before. Back in grad school, my first-semester semantics course was with Veneeta Dayal and our textbook was (the first edition of) Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet's Meaning and Grammar, in which "more colloquial" forms of expressing propositional negation were typically replaced with the somewhat more stilted "it is not the case that", so that a sentence like "Pavarotti is not hungry" is expressed as "It is not the case that Pavarotti is hungry" -- or, if you prefer, "That Pavarotti is hungry is not the case".
(Lots of examples in Meaning and Grammar involve Pavarotti, James Bond, and Sophia Loren, commenting on their hunger and boringness, asking whether they like each other, claiming that Sophia Loren thinks Pavarotti is French, etc. Don't ask.)
Why the stilted substitution? (I hear you ask.) Well, part of what one learns early on in Meaning and Grammar is that a sentence like "It is not the case that Pavarotti is hungry and Bond likes Pavarotti" is false true [thanks, Steve] if either or both of the conjoined clauses ("Pavarotti is hungry" and "Bond likes Pavarotti") is false. In other words, the sentence must be true whenever any of the following three more colloquially-expressed sentences is true:
This generally holds for conjoined clauses, but not for embedded clauses. That is, the sentence "It is not the case that Loren thinks that Pavarotti is French" must be true when "Loren doesn't think that Pavarotti is French" (first clause negated) is true, but not necessarily when "Loren thinks that Pavarotti is not French" (second, embedded clause negated) or "Loren doesn't think that Pavarotti is not French" (both clauses negated) are true. Right? Right.
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Update, 12/28: Wrong! The real difference is that "It is not the case that Pavarotti is hungry and Bond likes Pavarotti" does not entail any of the three more colloquially-expressed sentences listed above, while "It is not the case that Loren thinks that Pavarotti is French" does entail (and only entails) "Loren doesn't think that Pavarotti is French". Thanks to Jonathan Weinberg for writing on 12/21 to point out my mistake here, and my apologies for taking so long to correct it -- you know, what with the holidays and all that. (Just goes to show you that a phonologist can be easily confused by semantics.) In any event, there's a difference, and what follows still holds. |
OK, with that background, you'll see why it surprised me to read the following quote from the President's press conference yesterday:
"Are we satisfied with progress in Baghdad? No, but to say nothing is happening is not the case," Bush said. (link)
At first I wondered whether this might be a misquotation, so I checked the White House transcript, where it's rendered only slightly differently: "Are we satisfied with the progress in Baghdad? No. But to say nothing is happening is just simply not the case." (audio)
Of course, what Bush was trying to do was negate the second clause: "it is (just simply) not the case that nothing is happening", meaning that "something is happening" -- i.e., that there is indeed progress in Baghdad. But the problem is that he embedded the "nothing is happening" clause under the "(for someone) to say" clause, so, if anything, his statement must be true only when "(for someone) to not say that nothing is happening" (first clause negated) is true.
Of course, I'm putting aside the fact that the stilted "it is not the case that" type of negation simply doesn't work with this type of sentence in the first place, which can perhaps be better appreciated by moving the negation to the beginning: "it is not the case that to say nothing is happening" (compare the grammatical-though-stilted "it is not the case that someone said that nothing is happening"). Then again, I'm also ignoring the possibility that one might analyze Bush's statement as if it had been rendered thusly: "... to say nothing is happening, well, it's just simply not the case", where the "it" specifically refers to the clause "nothing is happening". We're not ones to simply point out Bushisms here on Language Log, but in this case, I guess I just couldn't resist.
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Posted by Eric Bakovic at December 21, 2007 11:43 AM