I'll teach you to undernegate!
Caught on television yesterday:
That'll teach you to blow your quarters
on the arcade. [Walker, Texas
Ranger episode "The Covenant"]
conveying 'that'll teach you
not
to blow your quarters on the arcade'. Undernegation, of a sort we
haven't seen on Language Log since a brief mention in a
2004 posting by Chris Potts on "negation-indifferent items".
It's hard to get a feel for how common
will
teach
someone to 'will teach someone not to' is, because
references
to literal teaching are so frequent. Undernegative
teach takes a complement VP
denoting an action that the speaker views as undesirable, but there's
no way to search for such VPs in general. You can, however,
search for some specific VPs of this sort, for instance
talk back 'reply defiantly or
insolently'; {"teach X to talk back"}, for various pronouns X, gets a
modest number of hits, among them:
I'll teach you to talk back to me.
You've got too big for your place
for the last time. I've been taking too much from you, but I ain't
doing it no more. [Erskine Caldwell] (
link)
I'll teach you to talk back to your StepMother, I'll teach you to talk
back to me. From now on you'll do whatever we tell you with no back
talk, ... (
link)
"That will teach him to talk back", Banzi muttered. (
link)
That'll teach her to talk back to me! (
link)
Guess that'll teach me to talk back to a couple Diablo fiends. (
link)
(The subject of
teach in
these examples is either
that
or
I.)
Presumably, undernegative
teach
arises from "negation by association", as in
the
account Mark Liberman gave for undernegative
could care less some time
ago. That is,
teach by
itself comes to be seen as a sufficient sign of negativity, and the
not becomes dispensable.
There's no easy way to gauge the relative frequency of undernegative
teach versus explicitly negative
teach, but with the VP
talk back, it looks like the
undernegative is ahead.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 22, 2007 12:17 PM