| 词组 | hardly |
| 释义 | hardly The hastier usage commentators and school-book compilers assure us that hardly is a negative. More cautious observers say that hardly has the force of a negative or that it has a negative meaning. Hardly is not a negative. There is an important difference between • I hardly studied at all —Harvey Wheeler, in A Center Occasional Paper, April 1971 and the same sentence expressed negatively: • I didn't study at all. Try making a negative out of hardly in the following examples and you will see what we mean: • They had hardly known each other then —Robert Canzoneri, McCall's, March 1971 • ... mothers are often tired but hardly ever lazy — Bruno Bettelheim, Ladies' Home Jour., January 1971 • Trembling in every limb, hardly able to set one foot before the other, she opened the door —Katherine Anne Porter, Ladies' Home Jour., August 1971 • ... provide the translators with the problem—which they hardly solve—of finding reasonable English equivalents for his florid indignation —Times Literary Supp., 2 Oct. 1970 You can see that hardly approaches a negative but doesn't quite get there. Otto Jespersen (Negation in English and Other Languages, 1917) calls it an approximate negative. Approximate negative or not, the schoolbooks and handbooks are nearly universal in calling hardly with a negative (can't is the one most frequently named) a double negative. This is a misnomer in two ways. First, a word not a negative plus a negative cannot logically be called two negatives; second, and more important, the effect of two genuine negatives is usually reinforcement of the negation (see double negative 1), while a negative with hardly is actually weakened (softened is Jes-persen's word). To see the difference, let's compare the constructions. • I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn't hardly do anything with them —Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884 Huck is saying in this passage that his hands were shaking so much that he had considerable trouble in untying her, but he did untie her. Now let's make a true double negative out of it: • My hands shook so much I couldn't do nothing with them. If Mark Twain had had Huck say that, the female in question would still be tied up. So analysis of can't hardly as a double negative is wrong, and if it is to be stigmatized, that must be done on some other basis than association with don't never and the like. Now let's see where these constructions with hardly and a negative occur. They are found in speech: • ... and you couldn't hardly get a job —Edward San-tander, quoted in Studs Terkel, Hard Times, 1970 • There's not hardly an hour goes by that his face, or just the thought of him, doesn't flash through my mind —Terry Bradshaw, quoted in Playboy, March 1980 • Prénuptial agreements, [Mick] Jagger recently said, "don't stand up in court hardly." —Time, 12 Mar. 1984 • ... and nobody hardly took notice of him —Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ca. 1712 (in Jespersen) It occurs in fictional speech and in fictional first-person narration: • ... it gave us not time hardly to say, O God! —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719 (in Jespersen) • "I don't know," she says. "He acts kind of shy. He hasn't hardly said a word to me all evening." —Ring Lardner, The Big Town, 1921 • Now here's a funny thing about me: the first night on a sleeper, I can't hardly sleep at all —Sinclair Lewis, The Man Who Knew Coolidge, 1928 The combination without hardly seems to turn up in newspaper reporting from time to time: • The rest are left to wander the flat lowlands of West Bengal without hardly a trace of food or shelter — N.Y. Times, 13 June 1971 • ... a nice spacing of seven hits by Nelson to win without hardly breaking a sweat —Gerry Finn, Springfield (Mass.) Morning Union, 2 Aug. 1985 Summary: hardly with a negative produces a weaker, not a stronger, negative; it is not, therefore, a double negative. But it is a speech form not used in discursive prose. The difference between hardly with a negative and hardly without a negative is neatly illustrated in the examples from Katherine Anne Porter and Mark Twain. Katherine Anne Porter is writing as the omniscient narrator, and she uses hardly without a negative. Mark Twain uses Huck Finn as first-person narrator; Huck uses hardly with a negative—the construction that would have been natural to his speech. Keep this distinction in mind if you use can't hardly or other negative constructions with hardly in writing: use them only where they are natural to the narrator or speaker. See also hard, hardly; scarcely 2. |
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