[lit-ideas] Re: A Thomistic rejection of "Or not"? [correction]
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:53:12 -0700
I wrote
I agree with Lawrence. He is making, with different examples, the same
point I was trying to make in a longer post in which I gave some
examples of questions of the form 'Are you--- or not?' in
which 'or not'' was neither redundant or otiose, and added nothing to
the mere question, 'Are you---?'
This sentence is goofy in its own right, but it can't be fixed by
changing 'nothing' to 'something.' As I said later on in that post, I
now believe that utterances of the form 'Are you---or not,'
are, in many cases, not questions at all but idiomatic expressions. If
they are, this would mean that one doesn't begin with a mere question
and then append 'or not to it.' There are not
two parts to such expressions---the mere question and what's appended to
it; instead, the speaker intends it as a whole, and the audience must
understand it as one.
RP
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