Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

On 17 May 2004 Ray Brown <ray.brown@F...> wrote:

> Eh?  *"aint do nothing" just ain't English. "ain't doing nothing" does
> occur in many varieties of English (the formal equivalent is: am/are/is
> not doing anything).
  I agree with Mark. P. Line who wrote "I'm not interested in
delineating >>good language<<. I'm interested in delineating actual
usage."


> But I utterly fail to see how "ain't....nothing" can possibly be a
> circumfix. An example of a double negative, certainly - but a
> circumfix???
  I've answered this to a posting that stated: "[...] a single
morpheme! (At least, as single as French ne..pas, ne..jamais etc.
are."
  I used rhetorical question to give a parallel example in English,
an example that could make it clear that "ne..jamais" can't be a
single morpheme.

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