LINGUIST List 3.930

Tue 24 Nov 1992

Disc: Negatives

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Fran Karttunen, Negation run amuck
2. AHARRIS - Alan Harris, RE: 3.920 Queries: German, History of English, Am not I

An Associated Press release today quotes the Wayne County prosecutor
as follows: "It seems absolutely beyond belief that we could not
find a jury that could not be fair and impartial." Since the
prosecutor does not want the trial moved and was responding to
the defense argument that a fair trial was impossible in Detroit,
I assume he meant something like: We can find a fair, impartial jury.

I guess it's just that final "not" that throws me. Apparently the
editor of the student newspaper did not find it confusing, because
he set it in capitals to attract interest to the story.

Anyway, it looks to me like more of the same business we've been discussing.

Fran Karttunen

Message 2: RE: 3.920 Queries: German, History of English, Am not I

re am not I, or "aren't I":
there was a supposition that i read once that this construction was a
postbellum, reconstruction period, white teacher (read elementary school)
response to the use of "ain't" In other words, anything in that period, roughly
1865-85, that smacked of "black" should be expunged from the language of
learned individuals--at least that was the feeling. . . I do not know how
accurate that is or whether it can be even demonstrated, but given the little
sociolinguistic history that I know of that period, it sure sounds plausible.
In England, wasn't "ain't I " the preferred in, say , the time of Dickens?