Abstract
Litotes, “a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary” (OED) has had some tough reviews. For Pope and Swift (“Scriblerus” 1727), litotes—stock examples include “no mean feat”, “no small problem”, and “not bad at all”—is “the peculiar talent of Ladies, Whisperers, and Backbiters”; for Orwell (1946), it is a means to affect “an appearance of profundity” that we can deport from English “by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.” But such ridicule is not without equivocation, given that litotes, or “logical” (non-concordial) double negation, may or may not be semantically redundant. When the negation of a logical contrary yields an unexcluded middle, it contributes to expressive power: someone who is not unhappy may not be happy either, and an occurrence may not be infrequent without being frequent. But if something is not possible, what can it be but possible? Why does Crashaw’s “not impossible she” survive rhetorically while Orwell’s “not unsmall rabbit” is doomed? How is Robbie being “not not friends” with Mary on 7th Heaven distinct from being friends with her, if not not-p reduces to p? The key is recognizing in litotes a corollary of MaxContrary, the tendency for contradictory (wide-scope) sentential negation ¬p to strengthen (at least) pragmatically to a contrary ©p, as when the formal contradictory Fr. “Il ne faut pas partir” (lit. ‘It is not necessary to leave’) is reinterpreted as expressing a contrary (‘one must not-leave’). Just as the Law of Excluded Middle can apply where it “shouldn’t”, resulting in pragmatically presupposed disjunctions between semantic contraries, so that “p v ©p” amounts to an instance of “p v ¬p”, the Law of Double Negation can fail to apply where it “should”. When not not-p conveys ¬©p, the negation of a virtual contrary, the middle between p and not-p is no longer excluded, rendering the Fregean dictum that “Wrapping up a thought in double negation does not alter its truth value” not unproblematic.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Despite the reference here to “the contrary”, contrariety—unlike contradiction—is not unique: a given expression may have two or more logically indistinct contraries. See Horn and Wansing (2015: Sect. 1.6) for discussion.
The theoretical status of “neg-raising”, the lower-clause understanding of higher-clause negation across a range of propositional attitude predicates and other operators—as a rule of grammar, a semantic association rule, or a partially conventionalized pragmatic strengthening process—has been debated from St. Anselm to Collins and Postal (2014); see Horn 1989: Chapter 5 and my foreword to Collins and Postal (2014) for the chronology.
]
The negative prefix non- typically functions as a contradictory, forming minimal pairs with other contrary-forming negative prefixes; cf. Horn 1989: Sects. 5.1 and 6 below. Thus the contradictory non-adjective may be explicitly rejected as too weak, presupposing a scale of the form < x is non-Adj, x is un-Adj > :
In Talmudic days myrtles were used at funerals. Nowadays, the custom of flowers at a funeral…is not merely non-jewish but positively unjewish.
(Contribution to mail.jewish net list, April 1991).
While most speakers can be counted on to grasp the nuance of weakness conveyed by the negated negative, those with impairments in Theory of Mind like the high-functioning autistic savant Daniel Tammet have difficulty in determining the motivation for, and therefore the interpretation of, litotic structures:
Certain sentence structures can be particularly hard for me to analyze, such as: “He is not inexperienced in such things,” where the two negatives (not and in-) cancel each other out. It is much better if people just say: “He is experienced in such things.”(Tammet 2006: 162).
For a catalogue raisonné of eight motives for double negation, see Horn 1991: 91ff. Neuhaus (to appear), working from an extensive corpus of German nicht un- examples, has regimented that eightfold path into four interrelated functions: denial, potential presumption denial, mitigation, and understatement. As Neuhaus observes, the multiple uses of litotes illustrates the “indeterminate nature of figurative meaning” discussed by Colston & Gibbs (2012: 259). See van der Wouden (1996) for other considerations on the motivation for litotes and its connection to monotonicity.
Consider, for example, the eponymous but unfortunately now defunct Austin-based rock band, or the equally eponymous third track on Sloth’s 2012 digital album “A Few Household Chemicals in The Proper Proportions”, http://tinyurl.com/ltfn42g.
Another instance of Midwestern mitigation is the faute de mieux litotes identified in Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love (2001, p. 138):
Was this the classic instance of a smart woman selling herself short? As the weeks went on and I grew to know him better, I thought of all these default-mode negatives: he seemed not ignoble, not ill-spoken, not a bully, not inconsiderate, not obnoxious, not a boor, not violent, not distressing, not disdainful, not a bad dresser, not unmindful, not dirty or smelly… He was not unhandsome. He was not unattractive. In other words, he was husband material. Simple as that.
In Henry Miller’s dictum (1956: 57), “If you can’t give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it!”.
References
Aristotle. Prior Analytics, H. Tredennick, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938.
Aristotle. Categories and De Interpretatione, J. L. Ackrill, trans. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963.
Aristotle. Metaphysics, H. Apostle, trans. Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1966.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric, G. A. Kennedy, trans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Arlen, H., & Mercer, J. (1944). Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive. Song from musical film “Here Come the Waves”.
Bolinger, D. (1972). Degree words. The Hague: Mouton.
Bosanquet, B. (1888). Logic (Vol. 1). Oxford: Clarendon.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.
Caffi, C. (1999). On mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 881–909.
Collins, C., & Postal, P. (2014). Classical NEG raising: an essay in the syntax of negation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Colston, H., & Gibbs, R. (2012). Interpreting figurative meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.
Ducrot, O. (1973). La preuve et le dire. Paris: Maison Mame.
Eliot, T.S. (1942) Little Gidding, in Four quartets. Reprinted London: Faber & Faber, 1960.
Erasmus, D. (1517). Colloquia, C. R. Thompson, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Fowler, H. W. (1926). A dictionary of modern English usage. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frege, G. (1919). Negation. In M. Beaney (Ed.), The Frege reader (pp. 346–361). Oxford: Blackwell.
Geach, P. T. (1972). Logic matters (p. 1980). Reprinted Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harbach, C. (2011). The art of fielding. New York: Little, Brown.
Heyting, A. (1956). Intuitionism: an introduction. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Hoffmann, M. (1987). Negatio contrarii: A study of Latin litotes. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Horn, L. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context (pp. 11–42). Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Horn, L. (1989). A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reissue edition, Stanford: CSLI, 2001.
Horn, L. (1991). Duplex negatio affirmat…: The economy of double negation. In Papers from the parasession on negation, CLS 27 (pp. 78–106). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Horn, L. (2002a). The logic of logical double negation. Proceedings of the Sophia symposium on negation (pp. 79–111). Tokyo: Sophia University.
Horn, L. (2002b). Uncovering the un-word: A study in lexical pragmatics. Sophia Linguistica, 49, 1–64.
Horn, L. (2005). An un-paper for the unsyntactician. In S. Mufwene, et al. (Eds.), Polymorphous linguistics: Jim McCawley’s legacy (pp. 329–365). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horn, L. (2010). Multiple negation in English and other languages. In L. Horn (Ed.), The expression of negation (pp. 111–148). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Horn, L. (2014). The singular square: Contrariety and double negation from Aristotle to Homer. In J. Blochowiak et al. (Eds.), Collection of papers dedicated to Jacques Moeschler. http://www.unige.ch/lettres/linguistique/moeschler/Festschrift/Festschrift.php
Horn, L. & Wansing, H. (2015). Negation. In E. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negation/
Jespersen, O. (1917). Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: Høst.
Jespersen, O. (1924). The philosophy of grammar. London: Allen & Unwin.
Krifka, M. (2007). Negated antonyms: Creating and filling the gap. In U. Sauerland & P. Stateva (Eds.), Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (pp. 163–177). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lausberg, H. (1960). Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. München: M. Hueber. (Translated as Handbook of literary rhetoric. Leiden: Brill, 1998).
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Liberman, M. (2012). Double lie toe tease. Language Log post, March 12, 2012. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3839
Miller, H. (1956). Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. New York: New Directions.
Neuhaus, L. (to appear). Four potential meanings of double negation: The pragmatics of nicht un- constructions. International Review of Pragmatics.
Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English language. Reprinted in Collected essays (pp. 353–367). London: Secker & Warburg, 1961.
Parsons, T. (2012). The traditional square of opposition. In E. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/square/
Peacham, H. (1593). The garden of eloquence. London: H. Iackson.
Puttenham, G. & Puttenham, R. (1589). The arte of English poesie. London: Field.
Quintilian, M. F. Institutio oratoria. H.E. Butler, trans. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, 1920–1921.
Richter, F. K. (1944). Hitler and words. Etc, 1, 256–258.
Sapir, E. (1944). Grading: A study in semantics. Reprinted in P. Swiggers et al. (Eds.), The collected works of Edward Sapir, I (pp. 447–70). Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008.
Scriblerus, M. (1727). The Art of Sinking. Pseudonymous publication by A. Pope, J. Swift and J. Arbuthnot, appearing in first edition of the Swift-Pope Miscellany. Reproduced under editorship of E. L. Steeves. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1952.
Seright, O. (1966). Double negatives in Standard American English. American Speech, 41, 123–126.
Sigwart, C. (1885). Logic, vol. I., H. Dendy, trans. New York: Macmillan, 1895.
Tammet, D. (2006). Born on a blue day. New York: Free Press.
van der Wouden, T. (1996). Litotes and downward monotonicity. In H. Wansing (Ed.), Negation: A notion in focus (pp. 145–167). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Ward, G., & Hirschberg, J. (1991). A pragmatic analysis of tautological utterances. Journal of Pragmatics, 15, 507–520.
Zaefferer, D. (1991). Conditionals and unconditionals: Cross-linguistic and logical aspects. In D. Zaefferer (Ed.), Semantic universals and universal semantics (pp. 210–236). Berlin: Foris.
Acknowledgments
Some of this material was presented in other forms at other forums, including the first World Congress on the Square of Opposition in Montreux (June 2007), LNAT (Logic Now and Then) in Brussels (November 2008), ESSLLI in Ljubljana (August 2011), SCLP in Santa Cruz (November 2011), CRISSP in Brussels (December 2011), the LOT Summer School in Driebergen (July 2012), AMPRA 1 in Charlotte (October 2012), the CIL Logical Words workshop in Geneva (July 2013), and of course Go Figure in London (June 2013). I am grateful to commenters at those occasions and to Barbara Abbott, Donka Farkas, Dany Jaspers, Mark Liberman, Jacques Moeschler, Laura Neuhaus, and Mihaela Popa for helpful interactions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Horn, L. Lie-toe-tease: double negatives and unexcluded middles. Philos Stud 174, 79–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0509-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0509-y