1

There is no chance the email you recieved isn't a scam.

How to interpret this sentence? If I attempt to remove the double negative, it doesn’t make much sense to me at all.

There is a chance the email you received is a spam? Is this a valid reading of email?

A non-native English speaker here.

Man with no Name
  • 13
  • 2
    If you remove the double negatives, you get "the email you received is certainly a scam", which is exactly what the sentence means. – The Photon Oct 29 '19 at 23:39
  • 1
    This belongs on English language learner's. The email is spam, there is no chance it isn't. This isn't a "double negative" in common use of the term, it's just two negatives that are close to each other. A double negative would be like, "there ain't no chance..." –  Oct 29 '19 at 23:40

2 Answers2

1

The negatives here do not exactly cancel. Consider the sentence as a proposition wrapped in a probability.

There is no chance that X means that the probability of X is zero, so X is certainly false.

What is certainly false here? That the email is not a scam. If that is certainly false, then the email certainly is a scam.

Anton Sherwood
  • 974
0

Reworded - There is zero probability, that the email you received is not a scam. The phrase, "no chance" means won't occur, even by accident. The phrase, "isn't a scam" means is not a scam. To best analyze writing that contains words that are contractions, I'll almost always change those words into the full words.

AdvenJack
  • 115