"I leaked nothing to nobody" (around 3:42 in the video)
Is the sentence above from Susan Rice grammatically correct in standard American English (SAE)? Seems like it should be:
I leaked nothing to anybody/anyone.
If not SAE, is it maybe African American Vernacular English (AAVE)?
If not AAVE, would the double negative make it a positive? Maybe weasel wording or understatement (litotes)?
Best Answer
It's not a dialect thing, it is grammatical standard English.
The "double negative" rule applies to situations where you have two possible negation strategies, one being a negated auxiliary verb + a negative polarity item; the second being a content word with negative meaning.
The rule is that you can't use both strategies at the same time. Also, related is that using an NPI like anything or at all can't be used with a non-negated main verb:
Rice uses strategy (2), instead of strategy (1) (which would have been I didn't leak anything to anybody.). This is a more direct way of speaking and is well suited to the spoken medium.