The meaning of "necessarily" in non-standard dialects of English

Factual Questions
1

I teach logic, critical thinking and philosophy to non-traditional college students. (Adults with established careers, people who didn’t do well in High School the first time around, people in extremem poverty, and so on.) The great majority of my students–but not all–are African American.

On Friday and today, in two different classes, I had a strange conversation with them about the word “necessarily.” In both classes, some students were sure that the phrase “it necessarily follows that” means “it might follow, or it might not.” Not even “probably” but just “maybe, maybe not.”

I took a poll, using “clickers” (little devices that allow them to register an answer anonymously) about this usage.

The question was, “Select A if ‘Necessarily’ means ‘definitely,’ select B if ‘necessarily’ means ‘maybe’”. (I now don’t remember the exact phrasing of the prompt. It was along those lines though.)

Over two thirds of the class selected B.

“Okay,” I thought. “Maybe this is a dialectical difference I’ve never heard of?”

But further careful conversation, devoid of argument and thoroughly exploratory in intent and execution, about determining synonymy through word replacement and things like that, seemed, after a few minutes, to evince genuine “light bulb” moments in the students. They all seemed to come around to the view that “necessarily” means something more like “definitely” than “maybe”.

But what the heck? How could they become convinced of this, given that they were so sure about what they meant by the term before?

Are there known dialects in which necessarily really does mean something like “maybe”?

An example students gave was the phrase “not necessarily” which they at first seemed to be in consensus about–that it’s a phrase where “necessarily” is being used to mean “maybe”. Synonymy tests on this phrase seemed to evince “light bulbs” in many of them.

But I mean… I just… I don’t get it. I don’t know what happened. Did I take the first steps toward teaching them a new dialect? Did I help them see more clearly what their own words mean to them? I don’t know which of these things (or some other thing) happened. But if the latter, what made them so certain about the idea that necessarily means maybe in the first place? If the former, then why did they seem to realize (rather than simply accept) that necessarily doesn’t mean maybe after all?

Very interesting but confusing situation.

2

My guess is they probably just haven’t given it much thought before. In casual speech (IME), the phrase “not necessarily” is a universal idiom, and much more common than “necessarily” used by itself. I know I pretty much never use “necessarily” except in academic writing.

3

Well “not necessarily” does mean “maybe”. “It’s not necessarily illegal”:“It may be illegal”. “It’s not necessarily going to rain”:“It may be going to rain”.

Combine this with the fact that the only time most people see the word “necessarily” is in conjunction with a negative or a reducer. Look at the Google results:
[Not necessarily] = 34,700,000 results.
[necessarily -“not necessarily” -“ain’t necessarily” -“isn’t necessarily” -"doesn’t necessarily] = 29,700,000 results, almost all of them in the form of questions in essay style writing.

I’m not seeing any instances in the first 5 Google pages of where a person with only a High School education is likely to encounter the word “necessarily” without a negative. In contrast “not necessarily” and “ain’t necessarily” return movies, TV shows, popular press, lyrics etc.

Maybe this is the source of the confusion. Any time a person with limited education sees or hears the word “necessarily” it in conjunction with “not” and thus means “maybe”.
I guess you’d have to look at the examples you were using to know if this is the case. The fact that the class pegged the word in “not necessarily” as “maybe” but later worked out the real meaning suggests that it is the case.

4

I would guess (as you touched upon) they were so used to hearing the word as part of the phrase “not necessarily” - which must be far and away the most common context for the word in colloquial speech - and simply started to process “not necessarily” as a figure of speech without parsing its literal meaning. It seems similar to the “could care less” issue in which people who use that expression don’t realize they are contradicting their intended meaning; the same light bulbs switch on when you point out that “couldn’t care less” is more logical.

friedo is saying the same thing - I got in a little late

5

Hmm, if this is a case of people dropping the “not,” could it parallel the case of “I couldn’t care less” morphing into “I could care less”?

6

et tu.

7

Maybe they spent too much time reading M’Culloch v. Maryland:

(bolding mine)

Presto, bango - necessary means "proper,“or “suitable,” or useful,” or “occasion for,” or “wanted.” Or whatever, apparently. :smack:

ETA: cite http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=17&invol=316

8

I can’t help but wonder if demographics are at play here, and am reminded of the old Ebonics debate. The example that comes most readily to mind is the divergence in the perceived meaning of the statement “She been/‘bin’ married.” Whites tended to interpret this as in the present perfect tense (meaning “she was married, but is not married any longer”), while African Americans tended to infer that the statement indicated that she was still married.

Regional and cultural influences can really sour communications in terms of statement structure and pronunciation. As Huck Finn summarized, “why don’ a Frenchman talk like a man?”

9

It’s almost as if putting “not” in front of a word changes the meaning.

10

I would guess that necessāriē has always been used in ambivalent statements, even though its strict meaning is univalent. If you always use it in the ambivalent sense (maybe, but…), and always in the negative, then it makes sense that the negative of an ambivalent statement would be seen as ambivalent (maybe not, but).

My own Logic professor was very keen to make sure we talked in terms of “following from” (is a deductively logical consequence of) rather than merely “following” in the broader sense. It might be something you’ll want to just work into your lesson plan. “Today, we’re going to be very specific about the concept of necessity.”

11

I love the clicker idea. It lets everyone participate , stay anonymous, and yet get an instant response. You must be a great teacher.

12

Heh, yeah, well, it’s definitely part of the way I’ll be teaching the course from now on. I just was taken by surprise this time around… it simply didn’t occur to me that there was any confusion about the meaning of the word “necessarily.” Confusion about how literally to take it, sure. But confusion about its basic meaning? That I never saw coming…

13

And is probably preferred by school administrators over the “audience applause-o-meter” method.

14

There is a sort of parallel thing in French. The most commpn way to say “not” is “ne [verb] pas”, which originally meant “not a step”. But since the “ne” is such a tiny word, people began to feel the “pas” carry the weight of the negativity – so that, in casual speech, the “ne” is skipped altogether, and people feel “pas” to mean “not”.

Like your “not necessarily”, it’s about a phrase becoming so much more common than its constituent parts, that there is mass confusion about which part of it carries the “weight” of the entire phrase’s meaning; and then the meaning becomes more ascribed to the “physically” weightier part of the phrase.

15

Linguist here.

I agree with those who said that the overwhelming usage of ‘not necessarily’ makes people associate the phrase with a sense of ‘maybe’. Secondly the African American English dialect does make use of double negation as opposed to Standard American English which does not (in theory). This could lead to an even smaller role for the word ‘not’ similar to what JKellyMap said about French.

16

Agree with the posts above.

In fact, I used to make a similar mistake: the word “equivocal” in my mind meant something like certain or unambiguous. I guess it’s because I’d seen the word “unequivocal” about a million times more often and there was a deep association there.

And on a separate point, IME when people have a misconception of what a word means, it is very often the exact opposite of the word’s true meaning.
Perhaps the context in which a word is used tells you the word’s relationship to other entities but not its “sign”.