I'm no taller than John?

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5jj

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[FONT=&quot]BC: The ghosts of prescriptive grammarians. I can't understand what their accomplishments or lack thereof have to do with the existence of logic in languages.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]5jj: If someone in a usingenglish.com thread says that one interpretation of an utterance must ‘logically’ be different from another, then, I do not think it totally irrelevant to suggest that this was what prescriptive grammarians used to do. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]I had expressed my view that there was a difference between he is no taller than and he is not taller than. I admit that ‘logically’ there is no difference, but that does not prove that there isn’t, as we saw with he is no teacher and he is not a teacher[FONT=&quot].[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]BC: Do you find it inappropriate to call illogical the following reasoning?

Tom is taller than me. Therefore, I am shorter than Tom.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [FONT=&quot]5jj: [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Not at all. I have never suggested that. But that is a different example from the one we were discussing[/FONT][FONT=&quot].[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Would you rather say that logic has nothing to do with its acceptability? [/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Not in this example. BC, if we try to prove the (un)acceptability of certain utterances by logic, we would have to conclude that the interrogative form of I am is amn’t I? but it’s not – the acceptable form is aren’t I?[/FONT]
 

birdeen's call

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It's clear enough for me now. Thank you.
 

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freezeframe:
2. makes no sense to me. If you say "The chip is no bigger than a grain of rice", the understanding is that they're both small, not big. Why wouldn't the meaning be also "the opposite", so to speak, for the above?

We know a grain of rice is small, so our understanding of the sentence flows from that. I would read that as telling us "the chip is about the size of a grain of rice", to give us an idea of its actual size.

But:
"This chip is no more beautiful than that grain of rice".

a) To me this says: They both have their own beauty but I don't think that the chip more beautiful.
b) It could be saying, "like that grain of rice, the chip has no beauty", but that's not how I would first hear it unless it went on "... and they're both dead plain".

As with Paris/Prague, my own feeling about the undoubted beauty of these things (microchips and rice) influences me to read it as (a) unless I'm given a strong clue not to do so.

In my experience, this is how this form usually works.

PS: I'm assuming you mean a microchip, not a potato chip.
 

JMurray

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freezeframe: How can this be?

... but trust me, they are no more beautiful than radio valves and green peas.
 

freezeframe

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freezeframe: How can this be?

... but trust me, they are no more beautiful than radio valves and green peas.

Cool.

Your sarcasm was duly noted.
 

Soup

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I can understand 1, but in 2 in my grammar book, it compares to a math equation saying no means 0, so it make the meaning of equality, is it true?
Even if it is, it's hard to understand. What's the difference between not and no in this case?

1. I am not taller than John = Not {I am taller than John}
not (A>B) -> A<=B
2. I am no taller than John = I am {no taller} than John
no =zero : no(A>B) -> A=B
I adore the fact that someone has used math to explain negation (I wonder if it would work with double negatives). It's rather interesting, to say the least, and while I have read what others have had to say on the topic--all four pages--I would like to keep my comment to the original question and explain why I agree with what the grammaritician is saying. That is, No = 0 makes sense to me. Here's why.


To me, the equation reads as follows:


A, I
>, not taller than
B, John
->, then
<, shorter than
=, the same height as



not(A>B) -> A<=B

1) If I am not taller than John, then I am shorter than or the same height as John.

I agree. Not taller has two meanings, the first of which is its default meaning (common meaning), the second of which is its marked meaning (uncommon meaning):


  1. I am shorter (stress on not)
  2. I am the same height

Not, an adverb, negates the verb am, not the word taller nor the comparative taller than, but because taller than is part of the predicate it cannot take on a positive meaning, which is why not taller than can mean shorter than or the same height as, but never taller than.


no(A>B) -> A=B

2) If I am no taller than John, then I am the same height as John.

I agree. No taller has one meaning, the same height as.

No, an adjective, modifying taller than, a comparative form, negates two meanings:


(i) shorter than
(ii) the same height as


and, as such, cancels them out (in other words, No = 0, therefore A = B)


(i) A is no more taller than B
(ii) A is no more shorter than B

Therefore, A is the same height as B.


(I like this kind of math. It's Kewl. Double negatives anyone?)
 

birdeen's call

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(I like this kind of math. It's Kewl. Double negatives anyone?)

Standard mathematical logic says that

~(~p)<=>p

is a tautology, which means that a sentence p negated twice is true when the very sentence p is true, and is false when the sentence p is false.

I've just written something more here, but Google Chrome was nice enough to delete all of it and I can't find the undo button. Great. :up:
 

JMurray

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freezeframe: Your sarcasm was duly noted.

Sorry ff, I didn't make myself clear. I truly like how all those things look, so no sarcasm was intended.
I shouldn't post after midnight.
 

Soup

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Standard mathematical logic says that

~(~p)<=>p

is a tautology, which means that a sentence p negated twice is true when the very sentence p is true, and is false when the sentence p is false.

I've just written something more here, but Google Chrome was nice enough to delete all of it and I can't find the undo button. Great. :up:
Not a good day. It happened to me too yesterday.:roll:

I was hoping to use the grammaritican's equation 0(A>B> -> A=B to see if it would work for double negatives, for example:


  • I have shoes.
  • I don't have shoes.
  • I don't have no shoes. double negative
Do you think it would work or is the equation applicable only to comparatives?
 

birdeen's call

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I think it's a very difficult question. What I'm writing now is the third or fourth version of this post.

I would first rewrite 5jj's original formula:

A 0(>) B --> A = B

I'm still not exactly happy with the idea of the relation ">" being "zeroed", but if that's how most native speakers see this, I must accept. (Now it seems the idea has gained a slight advantage in this thread.) Anyway, I think it will be clearer if we write the 0 next to what it "zeroes", that is the "is larger than" sign. It doesn't matter much in this case, but I believe it's better if we want to generalize the notation to

I don't have no shoes.

Now we could write for example

not (I have 0(shoes)) --> I have (not (0(shoes)) --> I have +(shoes)

where "0" "zeroes" the word "shoes" and "+" means more than 0 or a positive number of. It is very unclear though in my opinion how "zeroing" the relation > and "zeroing" shoes should be similar. "Shoes" are objects, not a relation.

A way of dealing with it could be to treat having no shoes as a relation. Let's denote the number of my shoes by A. Then

I have no shoes.

means

A = 0.

Now, we can write this:

not (A = 0) --> A > 0.

"not (A = 0)" would be a formula denoting

I don't have no shoes.


and "A > 0" would be a formula denoting

I have some shoes.


But this is not similar to 5jj's formula. No relation is "zeroed" here. I just said that "no shoes" means the same as "0 shoes".

There is yet another way in my opinion. We could abandon the thought of "zeroing" relations and rewrite 5jj'sd formula this way:

(distance between A and B) = 0 --> A = B

Now, we interpret "I'm no taller than Tom" as

(distance between A and B) = 0.

My opinion is that the above problems are not to be overcome. But I'd like to see myself proven wrong.
 
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5jj

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I would first rewrite 5jj's original formula:

A 0(>) B --> A = B
I cannot join in this discussion, because the correct use of '~', '{', '>' , etc is way beyond my non-mathematical mind. I have dropped in here merely to note that I used my 'original formula' only as an attempted response to keannu's original question. I used (or misused) the symbols as I thought keannu had used them.

If my ignorance is clouding the issue, please ignore my use of the symbols.
 

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I cannot join in this discussion, because the correct use of '~', '{', '>' , etc is way beyond my non-mathematical mind.
I haven't attempted to use those symbols "correctly" either. As I understand what we're doing here, it's just an attempt to produce some concise strings of symbols that could help a learner understand how the word "no" works. From a mathematician's point of view, most of what I have written above is meaningless. I hope it's not completely meaningless to a regular person though, but I'm not sure this is the case. At least I tried. :)
 

5jj

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SanMar

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Is it common to use symbols (in the above posts) to try to explain language? I have never seen that before seems really difficult.

With respect to "the no" use ... as a native speaker from Canada my two cents on the matter...

memories of a university presentation....

Person A: Go ahead, you can answer that question, you are so good at explaining stuff.

Person B: ME!? I am no better at explaining stuff than you are!


no better, or no taller ... I also infer that they are similar in ability or height where as not better, not taller I don't infer anything at all.....(hopefully I've used the world infer correctly! will be my next post if I haven't:oops::)

Not a teacher.
:)
 

philo2009

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I should be interested in seeing any data supporting the notion that it is.

From the time that self-appointed arbiters started writing grammars, people have attempted to impose mathematical logic on the language. Some of their efforts succeeded, in the formal written language, at least; others failed. The rule against the emphatic double negative was one of their successes ( though it lives on in speech in some dialects), the 'shall/will' future one of their failures. Points not finally decided include the 'rule' against splitting the infinitive, and the use of the subjunctive in modern BrE.

If the language followed the rules of logic, there would be no irregular verbs, prepositions would all have one 'meaning', all adverbs would end in 'ly', ...

We seem to be at cross-purposes here. I am referring to simple inferential logic (an aspect of semantics), whilst you appear to be referring to regularity of form (an aspect of morphology)...
 

5jj

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We seem to be at cross-purposes here. I am referring to simple inferential logic (an aspect of semantics), whilst you appear to be referring to regularity of form (an aspect of morphology)...
I don't think we are really at cross-purposes.

It appeared to me that you, in post #5, were using what you now call inferential logic to prove that one utterance had the same meaning as another. I suggested in post #6 that this was not always possible. In post #32 you wrote of normal logic, and I attempted to respond to that in post #33, which you quoted in your last post.
 

philo2009

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I don't think we are really at cross-purposes.

It appeared to me that you, in post #5, were using what you now call inferential logic to prove that one utterance had the same meaning as another. I suggested in post #6 that this was not always possible. In post #32 you wrote of normal logic, and I attempted to respond to that in post #33, which you quoted in your last post.

Then we simply return to the question as to whether a significant proportion of native speakers suspend normal inferential logic in the case cited in the original question, concerning the adverbial use of 'no'. I can only repeat that I, for one, do not. Perhaps other native contributors would care to comment. Beyond that, I have, for the time being, nothing further to add.
 
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