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A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence ("You're not unattractive" vs "You're attractive").
But the term "double negative" can sometimes refer to the standard English constructions called litotes or nested negatives, e.g., using "He is not unhealthy" to mean "He is healthy". In some cases, nested negation is used to convey nuance, uncertainty, or the possibility of a third option other than a statement or its negation. For example, an ...
In rhetoric, litotes (/ l aɪ ˈ t oʊ t iː z, ˈ l aɪ t ə t iː z /, US: / ˈ l ɪ t ə t iː z /), [1] also known classically as antenantiosis or moderatour, is a figure of speech and form of irony in which understatement is used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double negatives for effect.
If affirmation and negation were missing from language people would only be able to communicate through possibilities. [2] The recent Reusing Inhibition for Negation (RIN) hypothesis states that there is a specific inhibitory control mechanism (one that is reused) that is needed when trying to understand negation in sentences. [3]
Negative concord, also called "double negation", as in I didn't go nowhere; if the sentence is negative, all negatable forms are negated. This contrasts with standard written English convention, which interprets a double negative to mean a positive (although this was not always so; see double negative). [89]
In elliptical sentences (see below), inversion takes place after so (meaning "also") as well as after the negative neither: so do I, neither does she. Inversion can also be used to form conditional clauses, beginning with should , were (subjunctive), or had , in the following ways:
Something happened, and you need money. Urgently. You look at your savings account. Tumbleweeds roll across the place your emergency fund should occupy. Meanwhile, your credit card beckons with ...
In propositional logic, the double negation of a statement states that "it is not the case that the statement is not true". In classical logic, every statement is logically equivalent to its double negation, but this is not true in intuitionistic logic; this can be expressed by the formula A ≡ ~(~A) where the sign ≡ expresses logical equivalence and the sign ~ expresses negation.