Learn English – “doubt…would” vs. “doubt…wouldn’t” in a question

modal-verbsnegationquestions

""Do you doubt that they wouldn't love to kill us all? I don't. It's clearly obvious."

Why did the writer use "wouldn't" instead of "would"?

Best Answer

As FumbleFingers notes in a comment above, the expression is part of an online comment responding to a January 25, 2015, news story at BizPac Review titled "Prisoner who escaped ISIS captivity tells NBC: They want something bigger than 9/11." The comment reads in its entirety as follows:

That could be true but do you really doubt the viciousness of ISIS? Do you really doubt that they wouldn't love to kill us all? I don't. It's clearly obvious

No doubt the commenter means to say, in the second sentence, something like

Do you really doubt its members' desire to kill us all?

or

Do you really think that its adherents wouldn't love to kill us all?

Unfortunately (for the commenter) it's very easy to get turned around when combining forms of negation, so that you end up saying (from a strictly logical point of view) the opposite of what you mean. Here the commenter has already navigated through one "Do you really doubt" sentence unscathed, although that one is a somewhat simpler construction.

The second sentence builds rhetorically on the first—but then it goes off the rails, perhaps because the commenter isn't sufficiently confident that "Do you really doubt" establishes an adequately negative overlay on the relatively complicated expression that follows. Or maybe the commenter simply forgot that the verb earlier in the sentence is doubt and not think. Constructions of the form "Do you really doubt that..." are fairly treacherous, especially if you're the kind of commenter who doesn't read what you type before pressing 'Post comment'.

In any case, do you doubt that the commenter meant wouldn't in the sense of "would" in the second sentence? I doubt it.

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