LINGUIST List 3.676

Mon 07 Sep 1992

Disc: Nicht

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1. , Re: 3.668 Queries: Not in German, Elicitation, NLP, French
2. Larry Horn, Re: 3.668 Queries: Not in German, Elicitation, NLP, French

Message 1: Re: 3.668 Queries: Not in German, Elicitation, NLP, French

re. german - the word "nicht" or a close approximation thereto is very
commonly used as a tag on question forms, arguably as a reduction of the
full tag "nicht wahr". it generally conveys the expectation of a positive
response, as in english "you wore that hat yesterday, didn't you?"

german also uses the word "oder", meaning <or>, as a tag: this leaves the
response much more open, similar to english "didn't you wear that hat
yesterday?"
		alex.

Message 2: Re: 3.668 Queries: Not in German, Elicitation, NLP, French

A clarification on the query of David Talmage about the possibility of
retroactive ...NOT in German, and more specifically in The Magic Flute. Being
somewhat interested in the topic, I looked up the relevant scene in my liner
notes to the opera, easily enough done since it's Act 1, Scene 1, and can
provide the following context. [The scene is one in which the three veiled
ladies of the Queen of the Night have just slain the serpent pursuing Tamino,
who subsequently awakens and assumes that Papageno, who arrived on the scene
after the serpent was slain, was his savior. The ladies then reappear, still
veiled, and Tamino asks Papageno who they are. He admits he doesn't exactly
know. We then have the following exchange.]

 TAMINO:
 Sie sind wohl sehr schoen? I presume they're very beautiful?
 PAPAGENO:
 Das denk ich nicht! Denn wenn I don't think so! If they were
 sie wchoen waeren, wuerden sie beautiful they wouldn't conceal
 Gesichter nicht bedecken. their faces.

 But of course the sentence-final negation in Papageno's first sentence is in
canonical position, albeit the sentence itself involves object-fronting.
Presumably, the actor portraying the birdman could win some laughs before a
contemporary bilingual audience by pausing before the "nicht", but I'm not
sure how natural such an effect would be; like David Talmage, I'd be
interested to know. In any case, there's no parallel possible here in
English. To find one, we'd need a context in which final negation IS
canonical, and the obvious one is in sentence-final position after a copula,
modal, or DO. (Who knows? I do--NOT!) The unequivocal cases of retro-NOT,
as discussed on the net a few months ago, involve cases which do not allow
an interpretation of this type (cf. "They must be very beautiful...NOT!").