did or did not

[JJM Ballantyne]

"I did not see anything. Excellent! Many people err here by putting 'nothing' which makes a double negative that turns the meaning around to the opposite."

Oh come off it.

It's true that the use of "nothing" here would not be "acceptable" in so-called "Standard English."

But no one hearing someone say, "I didn't see nothin'" would ever actually understand the speaker to mean "I did see something."

[Casiopea]

JJM, uhm . . . how does that relate to our topic "did or did not"?

[JJM Ballantyne]

I'm merely pointing out that when we provide information to students we should not qualify it with patently false pet notions.

The "double negative" is one of these.

I accept that English learners need to start out with a pretty arbitrary "rules-bound" form of English. But at some point, they are going to encounter real honest-to-God native English speakers who say things like "I ain't doin' nothin'."

They need to know that when someone says "I ain't doin' nothin'," it is not a sly logic game by the speaker who cleverly really means "I'm doing something."

The so-called "double negative" is used here for negative emphasis.

As it has for hundreds of years in our language despite the "tut-tutting" of "grammarians" who can't quite seem to accept that language doesn't work like mathematics.

[Casiopea]

I agree with you, and the added explanation is mighty helpful.

[Roro]

I won't disagree with you, JJM.
As far as I'm aware of, though, logical approaches to language are rather flexible -- we can treat the problem of double negation fairly properly in a formal way, IMHO