LINGUIST List 5.1154

Thu 20 Oct 1994

Qs: Lang and gender, Negation, Prosodic phenomena, Hebrew

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Alison Page, Language and gender in newspapers
2. Harold Schiffman, Multiple negative marking in English
3. , Q: Superlexical prosodic phenomena
4. , Q: Missing accusative case in the Passover "four questions"

I'm currently conducting research on language and gender in some Australian
newspapers. Is anyone aware of similar gender in newspaper (or media in
general) studies being currently or recently conducted?

Would appreciate any assistance

Cheers

Alison Page

alisondefcen.gov.au

I have been wondering about the question of `double (multiple) negatives' in
English, and how it came to be that "standard English" eschews them, while
other varieties exhibit them. (By `double (multiple) negatives' I mean
having more than one negative morpheme in any proposition, such as those in
column A below). We are told that non-multiple negatives are an
innovation in English, and that multiple negatives such as these in Column A
below are original in English and have been chased "underground" by
hypercorrection, education, the Standard Language Ideology, and other forces.

 A. B. (So-called "standard" English

1. I don't want none I don't want any.
2. He didn't see nobody He didn't see anybody/anyone.
3. You ain't goin' nowhere You ain't/aren't goin(g) anywhere.

My question now is when exactly did this innovation happen, (i.e. when did it
begin, and when can we say that it was "completed") and when is the *last*
time we saw multiple negation in literary texts where it was still acceptable?
As an `educated' reader of English, I cannot recall examples, even in
Shakespeare, of multiple negation, tho there very well may be some. Certainly
we have it in the colloquial portions of novels, e.g. in Dickens, and in what
is supposed to be colloquial or "nonstandard" speech in Shakespeare, e.g. his
buffoons, drunkards, etc.

My second question is what model of hypercorrection led to the development of
non-multiple negation? (I don't even know what to call this, but I mean the
forms in column B above). I would think that the most readily available
model would be French, but French _has_ multiple negation, or at least the
_ne...rien, ne...personne, ne...pas_ type, which even in modern colloquial
French has been changed, with _ne_ deleted. So what prompted English speakers
to abandon multiple negation in its "standard" variety, and how long did it
take for this feature to become internalized in at least some people's
grammars? (e.g. mine)

Hal Schiffman

I once wrote a fragment of a science fiction story, in which there was a
language with the fanciful rule that syllables had to alternate in vowel
quantity at the sentence level -- in other words, every sentence had to be
iambic. The language had a lot of synonyms and euphonic particles so that
you were reasonably sure of finding a word with the right quantity-pattern
for the context.

Of course there is no such language, but I would like to hear of any
examples with superlexical prosodic rules that constrain sentence structure
or word choice.

I have a Hebrew (or is it Aramaic?) query.

The traditional Four Questions asked by the eldest juvenile congregant
at the Passover service begin as follows, to the best of my memory:

"ma niStana ha-layla ha-ze me-kol ha-laylot?"

Literally:

"What it-will-distinguish the-night the-this from-all the-nights?"

Now, if this were standard modern Hebrew, I would expect to see the
determinated object "ha-layla" marked with the accusative prefix "et-",
thus: "ma nishtana et-ha-layla...".

What exempts this object from being marked accusative? I have heard that
this passage is actually Aramaic (hence, later in the Questions, "anu
okhlin" in place of Heb. "anaxnu okhlim" "we eat"); is this one of the ways
Aramaic differs from Hebrew? Or have I analyzed the sentence wrongly? (My
Hebrew is not strong.)