Why does Steven Pinker say that “can’t” + “any” is just as much of a double-negative as “can’t” + “no” is in “I can’t get no/any satisfaction”?

In reference to "I can't get no satisfaction" vs "I can't get any satisfaction", Steven Pinker said (at 6:13):

But "can't" and "any" is just as much of a double-negative as "can't" and "no".

I understand his broader point about one dialect being chosen over another as "the correct one", due to where the political power was, but I don't understand why "can't get any" is a double-negative.

I understand his broader point about one dialect being chosen over another as "the correct one", due to where the political power was, but I don't understand why "can't get any" is a double-negative.

If "I can't get any satisfaction" and "I can't get no satisfaction" mean the same thing, and the words "I", "can't", "get", and "satisfaction" mean the same thing in both sentences, then necessarily, the words "no" and "any" mean the same thing in that context.

Whether or not a word is a "negative" is a question about its meaning. It's a negative, in that context, if it means the absence of something and not the presence of something.

Thus if "no" is a negative in "I can't get no satisfaction", then "any" is a negative in "I can't get any satisfaction".

The word any, when used in a negation, is a Negative Polarity Item (NPI), which is defined by the paper Definite Descriptions and Negative Polarity as words that “seem happy under negation and are sometimes unhappy without negation”.

When you have a double negative, “standard” English dictates that you need to use a single negative but not both (or else you get litotes):

• I can’t get satisfaction.
• I can get no satisfaction.

In contrast, you don’t get a grammatical sentence with any:

• I can get any satisfaction.

“I can get any satisfaction” would be grammatical as part of a longer sentence but note then how it doesn’t mean “no satisfaction”. Note also that there’s another sense of any (“free choice any”) with a completely different meaning that would be grammatical in similar sentences because it’s not a NPI (“I can get any TV” meaning that no TVs are out of your budget).

I decided to see how this compares with a dialect where double negatives emphasize the negative instead of canceling it.

I did a lemma-grouped search for VERB no in COCA to get a baseline for American English. I looked at a random sample of 100 for the phrase “[MAKE] no”. All the hits I saw were single negatives. The same was true for the same search in iWeb.

I searched CORAAL for AAVE examples using the regex \bma[kd][^.,|]* no\b which is a slightly broader search but ultimately trying to find similar examples. 13 or so hits were “double negatives”, such as “don’t make no sense”. There were about 5-6 examples with a single negative (such as “that makes no sense”). This shows that the single negative “no” is at least sometimes used among speakers of the dialect, though it’s impossible to know why from this alone. In searches for other verbs (such as one looking for “can ... no”), I haven’t been able to find any examples with the single negative “no” but I can’t tell if that’s because there’s not enough data or if it’s ungrammatical in the dialect.

There’s a paper that suggests that words like “no” are NPIs in AAVE but they don’t follow all the same rules as NPIs like “any” in “standard” English, though I didn’t have time to read it fully.