| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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1. Grammar: Traditional Rules, Word Order, Agreement, and Case
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| § 30. hardly |
| In Standard English, hardly, scarcely, and similar adverbs cannot be used with a negative. You cannot say I couldn’t hardly see him. This violation of the double negative rule is curious because these adverbs are not truly negative in meaning. The sentence Mary hardly laughed means that Mary did laugh a little, not that she kept from laughing altogether. So why should hardly and scarcely be banned from use with a negative like not? Adverbs like hardly and scarcely may not have purely negative meaning, but they share some important features of negative adverbs. They combine with any and at all, which are characteristically associated with negative contexts. Thus you can say I hardly saw him at all or I never saw him at all but not I occasionally saw him at all. Similarly, you can say I hardly had any time or I didn’t have any time but not I had any time, and so on. Like other negative adverbs, hardly, scarcely, and their companions cause inversion of the subject and auxiliary verb when they begin a sentence. Thus we say Hardly had I arrived when she left on the pattern of Never have I read such a book or At no time has he condemned the movement. Other adverbs do not cause this kind of inversion. You would never say Occasionally has he addressed this question or To a slight degree have they changed their position. What’s more, adverbs such as hardly can be said to have a negative meaning in that they minimize the state or event they describe. Thus hardly means “almost not at all”; rarely means “practically never”; and so forth. This is why they cannot be used with another negative such as not or none. | 1 |
| More at
double negative,
rarely, and
scarcely. | 2 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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