978: Double Negative Aug 13, 2017

In the outside world, two wrongs don't make a right, and likewise in the world of English grammar, two negatives do not necessarily equate to a positive concept. For starters, using the word 'not' before a negating suffix like 'un-' such as with "I am not unhappy" does not necessarily communicate the same meaning as would "I am happy" without any word negating another, because both the speaker and the listener, assumedly, understand that there are more than two, in this case, emotions. Moreover, even if a sentence contains two instances of the word 'not', they only relate to each other if they appear in the same clause and in the right circumstances. Therefore, in the sentence "I'm not saying that I do not (don't) like you", the result is largely the same as with "not unhappy" in that the understood meaning would be somewhere in the middle between, in this case 'like' and 'do not like'. Additionally, some dialects of English as well, like Southern American English or African American English use a double-negative for emphasis, such constructions that use the phrase "ain't nobody", which is absolutely grammatical for the dialect.