{"id":84,"date":"2007-12-20T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2007-12-20T18:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/she-dont-love-you-no-more\/"},"modified":"2011-05-31T08:53:08","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T14:53:08","slug":"she-dont-love-you-no-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2007\/12\/she-dont-love-you-no-more\/","title":{"rendered":"“She don’t love you no more.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I heard this on a TV show.<\/p>\n

Problems:<\/strong>
\n1. The verb doesn’t match the subject.
\n2. Double-negation nullifies the speaker’s intended message.<\/p>\n

Explanation:<\/strong>
\n1. The pronoun “she” does not go with the verb “do”, even if the verb is in a contraction with “not”. The pronoun “she” requires “does” (or “doesn’t”), as in “She does …” (or “She doesn’t …”).
\n2. The “not” in the contraction combined later in the sentence with the “no” in “no more” leads to a sentence with a double-negative. Assuming that the speaker wanted to tell the listener that the third-party female (to which the pronoun “she” referred) no longer loved the listener, “no” should have been replaced with “any” in the sentence.<\/p>\n

I believe that there are two forces that led to this double-trouble sentence.<\/p>\n

The first force is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis: the single-syllable “don’t” is simpler to say than the double-syllable “doesn’t”.<\/p>\n

The second force, I believe, is the influence on American English today of a relatively large population of native-Spanish speakers. If one uses a negative Spanish pronoun, adjective or adverb after a verb, the verb must be preceded by “no” (which means the same as “no” in English) or another negative pronoun or adjective.<\/p>\n

For example, the pronoun “nada” in Spanish means nothing<\/em>, and “encontró” means (he\/she\/it) found<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So to say “He found nothing.” in Spanish requires us to write “Él no encontró nada.” or more simply “No encontró nada.” — NOT “Encontró nada.” (or “Él encontró nada.”), which native-English speakers expect when first learning Spanish.<\/p>\n

In other words, the above Spanish construction could be called a double-negative that is non-self-negating, and the construction is the correct way to write or say a such a negative in Spanish. In contrast and as far as I know, all double-negative constructions in English ARE self-negating.<\/p>\n

As more native-Spanish speakers in the U.S. learn English, they will tend to use — mistakenly — (self-negating) double-negatives in English because (non-self-negating) double-negatives are a required part of their native language.<\/p>\n

Solution:<\/strong>
\n“She doesn’t love you any more.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard this on a TV show. Problems: 1. The verb doesn’t match the subject. 2. Double-negation nullifies the speaker’s intended message. Explanation: 1. The pronoun “she” does not go with the verb “do”, even if the verb is in a contraction with “not”. The pronoun “she” requires “does” (or “doesn’t”), as in “She does…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,24,19,20,8,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-english-blunders","category-contractions","category-devolution-toward-simpler","category-foreign-languages","category-pronouns","category-self-negation"],"yoast_head":"\n"She don't love you no more." - Kirk Mahoney . com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2007\/12\/she-dont-love-you-no-more\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""She don't love you no more." - Kirk Mahoney . com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I heard this on a TV show. 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