Re:Are we in an AI Overhang?
by ben_w on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:08PM
(#23966427)
There was a story that a language lecturer had just explained how double-negatives were a sometimes a positive and sometimes an emphasised negative, and that likewise some languages used a double-positive to mean an negative. He claimed that English was not such a language, using double-positives only for emphasis, to which one of the students said “yeah yeah”.
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Re:Are we in an AI Overhang?
by thrownagain90 on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:56PM
(#23966924)
An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
(https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/double-positive.h...)
Re:Are we in an AI Overhang?
by gillesjacobs on Monday July 27, 2020 @01:12PM
(#23967116)
To be fair, "yeah, right" is a sarcastic statement and linguistically the two words do not scope eachother so the positive statement is produced at the pragmatic level, double negatives are syntactico-semantic.