I suspect that most speakers use a "pragmatic" rather than strictly
logic-based approach to dealing with negation -- that is, there's an
immediate jump to "why might someone say this?" that at least partially
bypasses "which unit does the negative group with?" That's the only way
I can understand why, for example, "I could care less" and "I couldn't
care less" are interpreted as synonymous by most people.

In this particular case, I'd normally think that a speaker saying "All
people are not Republicans" might be doing so for one of three reasons:

(1) S/he wants me to interpret it differently from "No-one is a
Republican," since that's a lot easier if it's what you mean. (This
gives your (and my) initial reading)

(2) S/he's having one of those not-infrequent slips of the tongue in
which the negative you meant didn't parachute in when you wanted it to.


(3) S/he had a logic class at some point, and is channeling something
like "For all X such that X are members of the set 'people', X is a
member of the set 'non-Republican'." 


I'd probably adjust my guesses based on what I knew of the speaker. If
s/he has a tendency to fixate on the Liar's Paradox and what it means
for reality, I'd pick #3, especially if s/he occasionally mutters
something about early Wittgenstein being *so* much better than later
Wittgenstein.


Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Katz, Seth
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 9:56 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: a problem in negation

A friend sent me the following example of a 'pet peeve':

		"All people are not Republicans" used to mean that there
are no Republicans,
		period.  When I hear this now, though, after a brief
celebration, I realize
		that the speaker meant "not all people are Republicans".
Sad, but true to
		the times.  

It took me awhile to hear his preferred interpretation of the sentence.
Why do we jump the negation from "Republicans" to "all"? That is, we
seem to be doing something like taking an existential statement like

		There are no people who are Republicans.
		There are not people who are Republicans.

And turning it into 

		There are people who are not Republicans.

Why?
 
Dr. Seth Katz 
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Bradley University

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