Does it exist? You can have a double negative, which can either mean "No" or "Yes" depending on the context (e.g., "not hardly"). But what about a double affirmative? Say, "yes mostly"? I ask you, the blog reader. I have not found any info on this matter.
Here's a joke about 'double affirmative' for you:
ReplyDeletePROFESSOR: Although in modern English the double negative is usually
taken to mean an affirmative, in many linguistic contexts the double
negative is an intensified negative, as the double affirmative is
_always_ an intensified affirmative. There is no known case of a
double affirmative being used as a negative.
STUDENT: Yeah, right.
Yes - affirmative
Right - affirmative
There you go... You just got a double affirmative. :D
I believe this joke began with a real life encounter, not between a professor and a student, but between two philosophy professors, one British and one American, at Columbia University back in the 1950s. (I first heard the story 35 years ago from a man who was in the Columbia class of 1970.) J L Austin, who was visiting Columbia, gave a lecture at which he noted that although a double negative can imply a positive, a double positive never implies a negative. From the audience, Columbia's own Sidney Morgenbesser, said "Yeah, yeah." See the obituary for Morgenbesser in the New York Times, August 4, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/us/sidney-morgenbesser-82-kibitzing-philosopher-dies.html , or the entry for him in wikiquotes, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser.
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