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A comment on Are we in an AI Overhang?. Parent comment

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...)

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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.
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