![\"\"](\"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/rats-ass-300x210.png\")
<\/p>\nIf something bad happened to someone you hold in contempt, would you give a fig, a shit or a flying f**k? While figs might be a luxury food item in Britain, their historical status as something that is valueless or contemptible puts them on the same level as crap, iotas and rats\u2019 asses for the purposes of caring.<\/p>\n
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In English, we have a wide range of tools for expressing apathy. But we don\u2019t always agree on how to express it, and even use seemingly opposite affirmative and negative sentences to express very similar concepts. \u00a0Consider the confusing distinction between \u2018I couldn\u2019t care less\u2019 vs. \u2018I could care less\u2019 which are used in identical contexts by British and American speakers of English to mean pretty much the same thing. This mind-boggling pattern makes sense when we realise that those cold-hearted people who couldn\u2019t care less have a care-factor of zero, while the others don\u2019t care much, but could do so even less<\/em>, if necessary.<\/p>\n Putting aside such oddities, negation is normally crucial to interpreting a sentence \u2013 words like \u2018not\u2019 determine\u00a0whether the rest of the sentence is affirmative or negative (i.e. whether you\u2019re claiming it is true or false). Accordingly, languages tend to mark negation clearly, sometimes in more than once place within a sentence. One of the world\u2019s most robust languages in this respect is Bierebo<\/a>, an Austronesian language spoken in Vanuatu, where no less than three words for expressing negation are required at once (Budd 2010: 518):<\/p>\n Mara \u00a0 <\/strong>a-sa-yal \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0re\u00a0 <\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0manu \u00a0dupwa \u00a0pwel.<\/strong> While marking negation three times might seem a little inefficient, this pales in comparison to the problems that arise when you don\u2019t clearly indicate it all. We only have to turn to English to see this at work, where the distinction between Received Pronunciation can <\/em>[k\u00e6n] and can\u2019t<\/em> [k\u0251:nt] is frequently imperceptible in American varieties where final \/t\/ is not released, resulting in [k\u00e6n] or [k\u0259n] in both affirmative and negative contexts.<\/p>\n You might think that once a word or affix or sound that indicates negation has been removed from a word, there isn\u2019t anywhere else to go. But some Dravidian languages spoken in India really push the boat out in this respect. Instead of adding some sort of negative word or affix to an affirmative sentence to signal negation, the tense affix (past \u2013tt <\/em>or future -pp<\/em>) is taken away, as shown by the contrast between literary Tamil affirmatives and negatives.<\/p>\n pati-tt-\u0113n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 pati-pp-\u0113n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 patiy-\u0113n This is highly unusual from a linguistic point of view, and it\u2019s tempting to think that languages avoid this type of negation because it is difficult to learn or doesn\u2019t make sense design-wise. But historical records show similar patterns have been attested across Dravidian languages for centuries. This demonstrates that inflection patterns of this kind can be highly sustainable when they come about \u2013\u00a0so we might be stuck with the can\/can\u2019t collapse for a while to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If something bad happened to someone you hold in contempt, would you give a fig, a shit or a flying f**k? While figs might be a luxury food item in Britain, their historical status as something that is valueless or contemptible puts them on the same level as crap, iotas and rats\u2019 asses for the purposes of caring. In English, we have a wide range of tools for expressing apathy. But we don\u2019t always agree on how to express it,…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/i_could_care_less_title-300x150.jpg\")
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\nNEGl<\/strong> \u00a0 3PL.S-eat-find \u00a0\u00a0NEG2<\/strong> \u00a0bird \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0ANA \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0NEG3<\/strong>
\n‘They didn’t get to eat the bird.\u2019<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/obama-300x225.jpg\")
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\n\u2018I learned\u2019\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018I will learn.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018I do\/did\/will not learn.\u2019<\/p>\n