Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

On 19 May 2004 Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@E...> wrote:

> However, suppose, for the sake of argument, that in French
> you *never* had _ne_ without _pas_, and vice versa, never had _pas_
> without _ne_.
  My French grammar gives sentences with _ne_ without _pas_. It
says that it's possible in literary language. On the contrary, it's
possible to use _pas_ without _ne_: I refer to the examples of The
Collins French Dictionary: "une pomme pas mu^re", "elle travaille,
(mais) lui pas / pas lui". Cf.
<http://www.wordreference.com/fr/en/translation.asp?fren=pas>


> Of course, the fact that you can replace _pas_ with other forms
> like _jamais_ weakens the view of them as a single unit.
  IMHO, that's the point. Word _pas_ is a simple placeholder for
the negative "zero complement". If _pas_ would be part of the
negative, we would expect it before _jamais_, _personne_ etc. Note
that _jamais_ is affirmative in phrases like "a tout jamais pour
jamais", _personne_ is affirmative, too, therefore linguistically
they not part of the negative.

  Thus we have a negative phrase like "ne <verb> <complement>"
where we have to use _pas_ in the position of <complement> if it's
missing.

> You sure it's not "ain't doing nothing" or "ain't done nothing"?
  Of couse, I'm not sure yet. Just "ain't do nothing" and "ain't
doing nothing" is the same for me as an undereducated Non-
Anglophone.

  A further cause of my incomprehension was that the "ain't" was
asterisked always in phrase "ain't do nothing" during the
discussion, not the incorrect "*do".

> That's not the phrase "ain't do nothing".  It uses "ain't" and a
> double negative
  I simply used the above as an example for double negative in
English. Its actual form was incorrect (not considering the AAVE),
but the content behind the form was correct.

  I think it would be sometimes helpful if the Anglophone list
members would consider the essence of my text and not of its poor
English.

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