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For example, the Spanish phrase No es nada ('It is nothing') contains both a negated verb ("no es") and another negative, the word for nothing ("nada "). Multiple affirmations : In English, repeated affirmation can be used to add emphasis to an affirmative statement, just as repeated negation can add emphasis to a negative one.
Metalepsis uses a familiar word or a phrase in a new context. [13] For example, "lead foot" may describe a fast driver; lead is proverbially heavy, and a foot exerting more pressure on the accelerator causes a vehicle to go faster (in this context unduly so). [14] The figure of speech is a "metonymy of a metonymy". [13]
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.
For example, changing "one could have seen anything" to "no one could have seen anything" changes the meaning of the last word from "anything" to "nothing". In some cases, by way of irony, an affirmative statement may be intended to have the meaning of the corresponding negative, or vice versa. For examples see antiphrasis and sarcasm.
Equivocation – using a term with more than one meaning in a statement without specifying which meaning is intended. [21] Ambiguous middle term – using a middle term with multiple meanings. [22] Definitional retreat – changing the meaning of a word when an objection is raised. [23]
A double negative almost always resolves to a positive meaning and even more so in colloquial speech where the speaker particularly stresses the first negative word. Meanwhile, a triple negative resolves to a negative meaning, which bares a stronger negativity than a single negative. For example, "我不覺得没有人不知道" (Wǒ bù ...
In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, [1] or closed-ended question is a question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provides a negative answer to the question.
If the prefix or suffix is negative, such as 'dis-' or -'less', the word can be called an orphaned negative. [ 2 ] Unpaired words can be the result of one of the words falling out of popular usage, or can be created when only one word of a pair is borrowed from another language, in either case yielding an accidental gap , specifically a ...