Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

"=?win-1250?Q?Tamás_Racskó?=" wrote:
>   On the other side, I used an English parallelism to a French
> double negative phrase to demonstrate for Anglosphones that these
> phrases are not single "linguistic units". It was a simple example
> and I think it was intelligible. From this point of view, the
> present state of "ain't do nothing" is indifferent.
Well, it's not an exact analogy.  _pas_ in ne ... pas doesn't have any
inherent meaning in Modern French (except, perhaps, negation), whereas
both "ain't" and "nothing" do.  Of course, the fact that you can replace
_pas_ with other forms like _jamais_ weakens the view of them as a
single unit.  However, suppose, for the sake of argument, that in French
you *never* had _ne_ without _pas_, and vice versa, never had _pas_
without _ne_.  *Then*, it would make sense to refer to ne ... pas as a
single unit.

>   On the third side, you wrote on 17 May: >>"ain't doing nothing"
> does occur in many varieties of English (the formal equivalent is:
> am/are/is not doing anything).<<  Probably you've omitted the
> particle "not" in this sentence by an accidental mistyping, but I
> took it as it is, i.e. the opposition to your above statement:
> >>*"ain't do nothing" does not occur in any variety of English<<.
What Ray Brown meant was that the exact for "ain't do nothing" doesn't
occur in English.  The form "Ain't do*ing* nothing" or "ain't done
nothing" does occur.

>   For me, it was an inherent statement in your argument. I do hear
> _vernacular_ Anglophones saying "ain't do nothing".
You sure it's not "ain't doing nothing" or "ain't done nothing"?  I
can't think of any time I've ever heard "ain't do".  "Ain't doing" or
"ain't done", yes, but not "ain't *do*".  Doesn't mean it doesn't occur,
just that it doesn't occur in English varieties *I*'m familiar with.

>   (If it's not English, in what language does Eric Clapton sing his
> song "Ain't nobody's business if I do"..?)
Eh?  That's not the phrase "ain't do nothing".  It uses "ain't" and a
double negative (neither of which Ray Brown was contesting), but it
doesn't use "ain't" followed by the base form "do".

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