In Negations^x

Hello Your question is related to so called "negative raising problem". It's one of the subjects many linguists studied and still now are studying. When followed by a (that-) clause, verbs like " think " can be used in two ways: . Anyway, when you use NEG-raising verbs like "think", "I...

Paco2004 wrote: I think Kennedy's one sounds relatively natural because it is intepreted to be in the contrastive construct of <not .... but ...>. The full text is "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country". Here the semicolon would be taken...

I think Kennedy's one sounds relatively natural because it is intepreted to be in the contrastive construct of <not .... but ...>. The full text is "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country". Here the semicolon would be taken as a substitute for "but"....

It occurred to me that 'the possibility of negation' might be a test. For instance, in situation #1 above, we can say: 3. If John is there already, we should go. If he isn't, we should stay here. It isn't possible to say this in situation #2, because we know John's location. However,...

Hello, Ajinchina, Welcome to The Forums! I can only offer my feeling: to me, "no more than" corresponds to "nothing more than", whereas "not more than" simply contains the negation "not". f.i.: - a few weeks ago, this kitten was no more than a furry ball. - yes, you can have some candies,...

I'm not clear on which rule we are talking about here, Taka, aside from my examples in my previous post-- which show the four meanings of affirmative and affirmative, affirmative or affirmative, negative and negative, negative or negative . Negation in the common verb requires 'or' where...

Hello Khoff I agree. We can parse "She didn't like him because he was rich" as "She NOT ". Here three elements are candidates to be negated. When we specify the negation to (liked), i.e., "NOT (liked)", we have to use "disliked" for "NOT (liked)". paco

"She didn't like him because he was rich." Here's another possibility that hasn't been mentioned: "She didn't like him just because he was rich." This one is also ambiguous, but I think it would be more likely to be interpreted as "she liked him, but not solely because of his wealth. ...

Hello Amandine Thank you for the information. It's really helpful. Yes, I agree we had better front an adverbial clause, especially in speaking, to avoid the ambiguity of negation scope; "Because he was rich, she didn't like him" rather than "She didn't like him because he was rich." But I...

Hi Paco I hadn't known either the importance of punctuction until I took a grammar class a couple of months ago. here is something that can be useful to remember: when a adverb clause precedes an independant clause ,a comma is used to separate the clauses. When the adverb clause follows,...