Learn English – Why is, “If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me,” not considered a double negative

conditional-constructionsconditionalsifmultiple-negationnegation

I understand that you can't have a double negative…but also, 'anyone/anybody' in this sentence wouldn't make sense:

If I don't use the microphone, nobody will hear me

So why is this not considered a double negative? What is the logic here? Is it related to the IF clause?

Best Answer

In most forms of standard English, negatives don't agree with each other, each negative negates something separately.

So:

  • "If I use the microphone, somebody will hear me" can mean that using the microphone causes at least one person to hear.
  • "If I don't use the microphone, somebody will hear me" can mean that speaking without the microphone causes at least one person to hear.
  • "If I use the microphone, nobody will hear me" can mean that using the microphone results in no one hearing
  • "If I don't use the microphone, nobody will hear me" can mean that speaking without the microphone results in no one hearing.

What people mean by not having double negatives is not that you can't have two negatives. It's that you can't have negative agreement. Negative agreement is where you say "I can't hear nobody" to mean that you can't hear anybody at all, or that you hear nobody at all. In negative agreement, the one negation applies to both words ("can" and "anybody"), commonly called a "double negative". Without negative agreement, "I can't hear nobody" would mean that you can hear at least somebody. Negative agreement is present in many languages, and variants of English, but generally not in variants of English considered "standard".

Usually you should reword sentences to avoid anything that sounds like negative agreement, so that it's not ambiguous whether you meant to use negative agreement or not. Your example, however, does not sound like something that could be negative agreement. This is, like you said, because they are two separate clauses joined by the "if" (and the elided "then").

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