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- Black Orchid
- Na pola puta...
- Pridružio: 22 Nov 2003
- Poruke: 1978
- Gde živiš: na preseku Vremena i Vechnosti
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* Primer koji si naveo je sasvim u redu, i to "It's not that I didn't........" je chak chesto u upotrebi.
Izmedju "It's not that I didn't..." i "I did know..." postoji izvesna razlika. Prvi je "blazhi", da tako kazhem. Npr, "Nije bash da je nisam voleo..." = pa voooleo sam je... onaaako  ("ma voli te, samo se pravi"  khm, sorry  ), ili "Nije da mi se film nije svideo, ali nisam bio ni narochito odushevljen", uporedi sa: "I did like the movie!" Postoji jos dosta razl. situacija, kao "I didn't like the movie, but I did like her character." ... Ali to vec nije ono shto si pitao
"Double negation" bi bilo "I didn't didn't know" ili tako neshto  Fraza "It's not that..." je u smislu "It wasn't the case". "Nije takav i takav sluchaj", "Nije da [sam znao / nisam znao]" ...
* Ukucash u Google "It's not that I didn't" iiii... -> " about 40,600 for "It's not that I didn't". " 
* http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~jmatthew/articles/doubleneg.html :
"...The only thing that's not right is the implication that two negatives are always bound to be equivalent to a positive. A lot of books say that. But two negatives are not always equivalent to a positive in English. In fact it's quite difficult to find a case in which they really are.
When you say something like, 'We can't not go, they're expecting us', you're using two negatives, but one of them is negating the bit about whether we can, and the other is negating the bit about going, and the 'can' is in between them. It's really saying, 'It's not possible for us not to go'. That isn't at all the same thing as saying that it's possible for us to; it's actually the same as saying that we must go.
So one of the things you have to watch out for is that the two negatives might be negating the content of two quite different clauses or phrases, and getting rid of them might leave something that isn't even similar to what the original said.
...
Is there any speaker of English who cannot see that if I call Gwyneth Paltrow 'a not unattractive woman', it's a distinctly feeble and grudging compliment compared with calling her 'an attractive woman'? Let's consider why there's such a big difference: the word 'attractive' is used to make the claim that something or someone falls in the upper ranges of a scale of beauty or desirability. The opposite, 'unattractive', is used to place things or people at the low end of that scale. Now, to say 'not unattractive' is to assign a description that merely rules out the low end. That leaves everything from about 45% attractive up to 100% attractive. But surely someone who uses a phrase compatible with the whole of that range doesn't mean 100% on the old attractiveness meter, or even 90%, because in that case they could have said 'attractive'. So 'not unattractive' is a locution that offers a modest compliment, without coming right out and making explicit the fact that high praise is not appropriate. It's a euphemism, or a tactful backing-off. ...
...a completely different phenomenon also called double negation, and that's the kind of negation illustrated in Cockney, by 'I didn't see nuffink'. This, educated people think, is mere ignorance. Anyone with a logical bone in their head should be able to see, they maintain, that if you did not see nothing, then that means you did see something. If you claim that you didn't see nothing when you mean that you did see nothing, you are ignorant and unworthy and should be sent back to whatever awful school was responsible for the teaching you clearly didn't get.
Well, this is a thoroughly misdiagnosed situation. Let me explain how a linguist looks at the phenomenon in question. There is in fact only one
negation in 'I didn't see nuffink', as used by Cockneys or working-class Australians or black Americans or anyone else who uses this device. It's the negative of 'I saw somefink', and what differentiates Cockney from Standard English has been entirely misidentified by calling it double negation. Here it is, somewhat over-simplified: Standard English has three separate versions of the item whose positive version is 'something'. I am referring to the words 'something', 'nothing', and 'anything'. The first of these, 'something', is used in positive contexts, as in 'I saw something'; the second, 'nothing', is used to create negative clauses, as in 'I saw nothing'; and the third is used nearly everywhere else: in negative clauses like 'I didn't see anything', in conditional clauses like 'If I saw anything', in questions, like 'Did you see anything?' and various other contexts. Cockney differs in one simple respect: the second and third versions are not distinguished. It's as if we had a language that was just like English but with 'anything' and 'nothing' pronounced the same. That's all that's going on.
The mistake is in seeing a mistake. This kind of usage is not a mistake. It's a form of words that is characteristic of many languages, including Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian and Cockney, but not Standard English. Linguists call it Negative Concord.
The Cambridge Grammar of English, I have decided, is not going to hush this up with a blush and a mumble and pass on as if embarrassed. It's going to great it seriously. It's going to explain, of course, that Negative Concord is not used in formal writing and should be avoided in all contexts where keeping up appearances is an issue. But it is also going to explain how Negative Concord works, which is something like this: Everywhere you would get an 'any' word, like 'anything', 'anyone', 'anybody, 'anywhere', 'any', or the indefinite article 'a', Negative Concord languages require that you use the appropriate 'no' word instead. It doesn't matter how many there are in the sentence, this applies to all of them. So if you take 'I don't want a linguist with a grammar book giving me any lectures about a proper way to speak to anybody', it comes out in Cockney or in a Negative Concord language, as 'I don't want no linguist with no grammar book giving me no lectures about no proper way to speak to nobody'. That's not a sextuple negation, it's an ordinary single negation. But there are five indefinite words like 'a' and 'anybody' in there, and they all get pronounced in Cockney the same as the negative words 'no' and 'nobody'.
You have to learn this if you're going to make any claim to knowing English. Because if you believe that when the Rolling Stones play 'Satisfaction' and Mick Jagger sings 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' he is singing about how it is impossible for him not to be satisfied, you can't even understand rock 'n' roll. A fully competent speaker of English knows how to work out the meaning of both 'I am unable to obtain any satisfaction' and 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction', and knows that the first of those would be suitable in a business letter and the second would be appropriate in personal conversation in a pub in Spitalfields or Pentonville. A person who cannot understand Mick Jagger's lyrics, even if they are written out on a sheet of paper (nobody can understand much of it when he's singing, of course, is not a better English speaker, but a worse one.
The way I see it, real class in being an English speaker involves understanding both the Queen saying, 'My husband and I cannot imagine anything nicer', and a Cockney speaker saying, 'Me old man and me can't fink of nuffink nicer'. Real class is being knowledgeable about the diversity of English as well as sensitive to the nuances of the different varieties. The status-obsessed grumblers who complain about other people's double negations do not have class. There is nothing classy about insensitivity to the complexity of the linguistic world around us. If you pay attention to linguistic diversity and appreciate the variety in your language, you'll find you can't get no satisfaction. "
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