The Semantics of Nothing If Not Constructions
Humanities
Ling 195 - Senior Thesis
The Semantics of Nothing If Not Constructions
“Nothing if not” constructions (NIN constructions) are constructions such as “Bob is nothing if not deliberate.”
This paper elucidates the basic meaning of these constructions and captures that meaning in a formal semantic theory. In the case of “Bob is nothing if not deliberate,” the construction means that Bob is deliberate and is not lukewarmly deliberate.
Instead of indicating the presence of a conditional, “nothing if not” modifies the predicate that comes after it. Evidence based on differences between the kinds of logical inferences that can be drawn from NIN constructions and conditionals suggest that NIN constructions should not be treated as conditionals.
The results of an experiment carried out also support this. In the experiment, constructions that were unambiguously NIN constructions were rated as less acceptable when the predicate following “nothing if not” had certain semantic properties, while this was not the case with constructions ambiguous between a NIN construction and conditional. This shows that NIN constructions are sensitive to the semantic properties of the predicate following “nothing if not” in a way that conditionals are not.
The predicates that follow “nothing if not” almost always admit of degrees, as a survey of the construction’s distribution in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) reveals. Bob may be more deliberate or less deliberate. For Bob to be “nothing if not” deliberate, he must be someone who is clearly deliberate and not a borderline case of deliberateness, someone who is questionably deliberate depending on how strong your criteria for deliberateness is.
The semantic contribution of “nothing if not” ensures that the subject of the sentence is not a borderline case of its predicate. “Bob is nothing if not deliberate,” is true if Bob is deliberate in all possible worlds. The criteria for which worlds are “possible” is based on the intuition that if someone is a borderline case of deliberateness, he or she is both possibly deliberate and possibly not deliberate. In some worlds these individuals are deliberate and in some they are not. Bob, however, is deliberate in all possible worlds, and thus isn’t a borderline case of deliberateness.
Although these constructions are not conditionals, future analyses may draw on the connection between the presence of “if” and consideration of possible worlds, alternative states of the world, in the semantics of the construction.
Keywords: semantics, logic, conditionals
