Linguistic Fuel for a Political Brushfire

By Geoffrey Pullum. A significant body of press coverage suggests that the Conservative-led government of Britain recently recommended wearing jumpers (sweaters) as a response to increases in heating costs, and later did a U-turn. None of this is true; yet somehow the British press managed to create a mini-scandal dubbed Jumpergate out of it. Jumpergate was spawned mostly by quotational inaccuracy verging on mendacity. But it was helped along by certain facts about pragmatic strengthening of specificity of negation. Let me explain. With verbs and adjectives having certain weakly modal meanings (mainly relating to desire, perception, likelihood, opinion, and advice; see The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Pages 838-843), negation is subject to pragmatic strengthening: It is liable to be understood more specifically than the grammar dictates. More...