Expletive negation

The term expletive negation is often used (especially in the linguistics of the Romance languages) for a negative marker that has no negative meaning.

Examples

 * French Je crains qu'elle ne vient 'I fear that she comes';
 * Italian Io sono più alto che tu non sei 'I am taller than you are'
 * English We don't need no education. (Pink Floyd song)

Synonyms

 * pleonastic negation (this was the usual term until the latter part of the 20th century)
 * paratactic negation (Jespersen 1940)
 * formal negation (Jack 1977)
 * abusive negation (Vendryès 1950)

Polysemy
See expletive (disambiguation page).

Origin
The term was apparently introduced only in the 1970s (cf. Muller 1978, Nocentini 2003).