![Give me a break, frontpage. The post about irregardless gives a completely vacuous justification:
-less already indicates “a lack of”, so adding ir- is redundant.
In terms of morphological composition, you could still have a cromulent word in “[irregard]less” (a lack of “irregard”) which would make the -less irredundant.
The truth is, we’re dealing with negation, and once you start playing with negatives, all bets for logical composition are off. For instance, many dialects and older variants of English employ concord negation where the presence of one negative particle sets off a bunch of negative switches. “I ain’t never…” etc. Then, you also run into over- and undernegation where people trip up with negation:
“As for the site, I’m going to try to get back on track with updating soon, but don’t be surprised if the new story doesn’t debut as late as April.” (*)
“To date, he’s held 118 (and counting) jobs, from missionary to garbage commissioner to grease salesman to fortune cookie writer, which wouldn’t be such a damning statistic had almost none of them been particularly funny.” (*)
“You guys never fail to disappoint me.” (*)
And then you have a whole field of syntax dedicated to negative polarity items. NPIs pose a question about whether certain words require some form of negation:
I don’t give a fuck.
I never gave a fuck.
I might not give a fuck.
(?) I give a fuck.
(?) I always gave a fuck.
(?) I might give a fuck.
Ask me if I give a fuck.
Do you give a fuck?
I seldom give a fuck.
(?) He failed to give a fuck.
Once you start studying negation, you immediately observe that (a) people don’t use negation in accordance to principles of logical negation, (b) people often use it to intensify statements even if they are already negated, and (c) your brain immediately turns to mush once you start trying to parse statements with three or more negations, especially if you throw in soft negations like “seldom”, “rarely” or “fail to”.
So while the justification about “irregardless” makes sense in its own little way (two negatives make a positive!), it’s blind to the complexities and nuances of natural language negations.](http://28.media.tumblr.com/wAArp4Tbqkuemv2sKLW14Mpio1_400.jpg "Give me a break, frontpage. The post about irregardless gives a completely vacuous justification:
-less already indicates “a lack of”, so adding ir- is redundant.
In terms of morphological composition, you could still have a cromulent word in “[irregard]less” (a lack of “irregard”) which would make the -less irredundant.
The truth is, we’re dealing with negation, and once you start playing with negatives, all bets for logical composition are off. For instance, many dialects and older variants of English employ concord negation where the presence of one negative particle sets off a bunch of negative switches. “I ain’t never…” etc. Then, you also run into over- and undernegation where people trip up with negation:
“As for the site, I’m going to try to get back on track with updating soon, but don’t be surprised if the new story doesn’t debut as late as April.” (*)
“To date, he’s held 118 (and counting) jobs, from missionary to garbage commissioner to grease salesman to fortune cookie writer, which wouldn’t be such a damning statistic had almost none of them been particularly funny.” (*)
“You guys never fail to disappoint me.” (*)
And then you have a whole field of syntax dedicated to negative polarity items. NPIs pose a question about whether certain words require some form of negation:
I don’t give a fuck.
I never gave a fuck.
I might not give a fuck.
(?) I give a fuck.
(?) I always gave a fuck.
(?) I might give a fuck.
Ask me if I give a fuck.
Do you give a fuck?
I seldom give a fuck.
(?) He failed to give a fuck.
Once you start studying negation, you immediately observe that (a) people don’t use negation in accordance to principles of logical negation, (b) people often use it to intensify statements even if they are already negated, and (c) your brain immediately turns to mush once you start trying to parse statements with three or more negations, especially if you throw in soft negations like “seldom”, “rarely” or “fail to”.
So while the justification about “irregardless” makes sense in its own little way (two negatives make a positive!), it’s blind to the complexities and nuances of natural language negations.")
Give me a break, frontpage. The post about irregardless gives a completely vacuous justification:
-less already indicates “a lack of”, so adding ir- is redundant.
In terms of morphological composition, you could still have a cromulent word in “[irregard]less” (a lack of “irregard”) which would make the -less irredundant.
The truth is, we’re dealing with negation, and once you start playing with negatives, all bets for logical composition are off. For instance, many dialects and older variants of English employ concord negation where the presence of one negative particle sets off a bunch of negative switches. “I ain’t never…” etc. Then, you also run into over- and undernegation where people trip up with negation:
- “As for the site, I’m going to try to get back on track with updating soon, but don’t be surprised if the new story doesn’t debut as late as April.” (*)
- “To date, he’s held 118 (and counting) jobs, from missionary to garbage commissioner to grease salesman to fortune cookie writer, which wouldn’t be such a damning statistic had almost none of them been particularly funny.” (*)
- “You guys never fail to disappoint me.” (*)
And then you have a whole field of syntax dedicated to negative polarity items. NPIs pose a question about whether certain words require some form of negation:
- I don’t give a fuck.
- I never gave a fuck.
- I might not give a fuck.
- (?) I give a fuck.
- (?) I always gave a fuck.
- (?) I might give a fuck.
- Ask me if I give a fuck.
- Do you give a fuck?
- I seldom give a fuck.
- (?) He failed to give a fuck.
Once you start studying negation, you immediately observe that (a) people don’t use negation in accordance to principles of logical negation, (b) people often use it to intensify statements even if they are already negated, and (c) your brain immediately turns to mush once you start trying to parse statements with three or more negations, especially if you throw in soft negations like “seldom”, “rarely” or “fail to”.
So while the justification about “irregardless” makes sense in its own little way (two negatives make a positive!), it’s blind to the complexities and nuances of natural language negations.
Congratulations for making the frontpage Zack.
I suspect there will be reblogs about how obvious the plural is to some speakers, but the point was that linguists—people who parse and analyze fine variations of language—lose grasp of what constitutes a grammatical/acceptable utterance. Consequently, it is not uncommon for us to solicit judgments from people for things that are perfectly clear to other speakers.
It is like how when you a say word/sentence over and over until it loses its meaning; this state of detachment from language is a very common one for the linguist, and that was the idea behind the post.
What A Linguist Does
Calls up friends during the middle of the day to ask what the plural to “runner-up” is.
