Regarding Bob Yates' claim:
>In my last post, I noted that double negatives in a clause do not mean the
>same as a strictly positive statement.  (a) is a less positive statement
>than (b).  This is true regardless of the context either sentence might
>occur in.
>
>a) The bombing in Afghanistan has not been ineffective.
>b) The bombing in Afghanistan has been effective.
>
>Observations like this are important if we are interested in the choices
>students make in their texts. This is an observation made without
>establishing an elaborate corpus of examples.  The claim can be easily
>falsifiable: provide a set of sentences like (a) and (b) and show that the
>(a) sentence with the two negatives
>are at least as positive or more positive than the (a) sentence.  I don't
>think such a set of sentences exists.

Well, actually, double negatives can be affected by context. They can be
used to minimize, but they can also be used for understatement, which,
again depending on context, can represent either true or false modesty. For
example, in a politician's retirement speech: "I hope I can say that my
tenure as mayor has not been entirely without achievement." This can well
be taken as a polite way of saying, "You will all agree that I did a superb
job." One of the most celebrated modern instances of understatement came in
Watson and Crick's 1953 paper proposing the double-helix structure of DNA:

"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated
immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Clearly context is important, and the study of language in context is
essential to a complete understanding of language. That said, I also agree
with Bob that much of language can profitably be studied (in fact, must be
studied) largely free from context. Any introductory linguistics text
presents the basic elements of phonetics, phonology, and syntax with
minimal attention to context--not because context doesn't matter, but
because they provide a necessary foundation for understanding language in
context.

Dick Veit
UNCW English Department

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