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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.
Negative polarity can be indicated by negating words or particles such as the English not, or the Japanese affix-nai, or by other means, which reverses the meaning of the predicate. The process of converting affirmative to negative is called negation – the grammatical rules for negation vary from language to language, and a given language may ...
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 ...
Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood as doing something—making a promise—rather than making an assertion about anything. Hence the title of one of his best-known works, How to Do Things with Words (1955).
Association fallacy (guilt by association and honor by association) – arguing that because two things share (or are implied to share) some property, they are the same. [94] Logic chopping fallacy (nit-picking, trivial objections) – Focusing on trivial details of an argument, rather than the main point of the argumentation. [95] [96]
Licensing contexts across languages include the scope of n-words (negative particles, negative quantifiers), the antecedent of conditionals, questions, the restrictor of universal quantifiers, non-affirmative verbs (doubt), adversative predicates (be surprised), negative conjunctions (without), comparatives and superlatives, too-phrases ...
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").
The two possible qualities are called affirmative and negative. [4] For instance, an A-proposition ("All S is P") is affirmative since it states that the subject is contained within the predicate. On the other hand, an O-proposition ("Some S is not P") is negative since it excludes the subject from the predicate.