# auf keinen Fall -- in Fragen



## brian

Hello German Forum, long time no see. 

I'm studying the semantics of "degree" questions, i.e. questions that ask the _degree_ to which something is true. For example:

(1) Paul ist 183 cm groß.
(2) Wie groß ist Paul?

Here, (1) can be interpreted as "Paul is tall to degree d," where d = 183 cm; and (2) as "To which degree d is Paul tall?" Answer: d = 183 cm. What interests me in particular is why most languages do not allow negation in degree questions:

(3) *Wie groß ist Paul _nicht_?

I won't go into the details here, but the reason (3) should be okay has to do with the fact that many semanticists assume that degrees are interpreted with an "at least" meaning, and not an "exact" meaning: so (1) could be spoken/true even if Paul is exactly 190 cm tall. (After all, if you have 12 eggs, then you certainly also have 11, 10, etc.; so if you're 190 cm tall, then you're also 189 cm, 188 cm, etc.)

Anyway, most languages don't allow sentences like (3). However, a German professor gave me the following scenario in German:

A: Ich glaube mir geht es so schlecht weil ich zu lange in der Sauna war, aber ich weiss nicht mehr wie lange ich drin war.

B: Wie lange bist Du denn *auf keinen Fall* in der Sauna geblieben?

A: (Auf keinen Fall laenger als) 20 Minuten. Da bin ich sicher.

My question is: does this conversation, and in particular B's question, sound natural to you? Could it possibly occur in real life?

I know that A's response is perfectly fine, but I have my doubts as to whether _auf keinen Fall_, which is negative, can occur in a question.

Thanks!

Brian


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## Savra

Mit _auf keinen Fall_ hätte ich gesagt: „Wie lange warst Du denn auf keinen Fall in der Sauna?“ Das ist vielleicht nicht die schönste Satzkonstruktion, aber ohne weiteres sagbar. „Wie groß ist Paul nicht?“ kann man auch fragen, allerdings klingt die Frage seltsam, da eigentlich niemand fragt, wie groß jemand nicht ist – und die Antwort ist auch schwierig, denn die Nichtgrößen Pauls sind ziemlich viele (eine überabzählbare Menge, um mathematisch exakt zu formulieren  ).

Aber es gibt auch sinnvolle Fragen mit _nicht_, ein Gleisarbeiter kann beispielsweise fragen: „Wann fahren denn die Züge nicht?“


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## berndf

The conversation is possible, I suppose, but the sentence as such doesn't sound natural. If you read this sentence in isolation, you couldn't make much sense of it.

I think the reason why you don't ask questions like (3) is because it has infinity many correct answers and almost all of them are non-informative (e.g. 27miles or 2 micro-meters).


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## Hutschi

But the form could be used in special context, may be also as idiom:

As Savra wrote:
_
Wann fahren denn die Züge nicht?

_This gives context to exclude practically almost all of the infinite answers.

A: Der Zug fährt fast täglich.
B: _Wann fährt er denn nicht?
A: Er fährt nicht zu Weihnachten und am Neujahrstag.
_A possible answer is: Sie fahren nicht an Feiertagen./Sie fahren nicht an Wochenenden. 

_A: Es gibt Bauarbeiten. Du musst mit Umleitungen rechnen.
B: Wann fährt denn die Straßenbahn nicht über den Pirnaischen Platz?
_A: Sie fährt dort ab morgen Abend nicht mehr bis voraussichtlich nächste Woche Dienstag.


Auf keinen Fall:

a: Wie schnell fährt denn der Rollstuhl auf keinen Fall?
b: Seine Maximalgeschwindigkeit ist 20 km/h. Er fährt aber auf keinen Fall schneller als 30 km/h.
c: Wie kann er dann mit 130 km/h geblitzt worden sein?

(There was such a real case. The driver had to pay because he was too fast. In an experiment in the TV he could not exceed appr. 25 km/h. It was manually driven. Nethertheless the justice believed in the photo and not in the experiment.) 

Usually you use such negating questions to find either exceptions or limits.

In coll. language neither the questions nor the answers are always wellformed in a mathematical sense. You have to add pragmatics and common sense to understand them.

In case: Wie groß ist Paul auf keinen Fall? You ask usually for a limit which is slightly larger than his actual size but you can expect for sure that he is at least a little bit smaller. This does not work with "nicht".

So I support Savra's answer.
"Auf keinen Fall" usually works in such questions to exclude something definitely. "Nicht" only works in some questions.


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## brian

Thank you, everyone, for your responses.



Savra said:


> „Wie groß ist Paul nicht?“ kann man auch fragen, allerdings klingt die Frage seltsam, da eigentlich niemand fragt, wie groß jemand nicht ist – und die Antwort ist auch schwierig, denn die Nichtgrößen Pauls sind ziemlich viele (eine überabzählbare Menge, um mathematisch exakt zu formulieren  ).





berndf said:


> I think the reason why you don't ask questions like (3) is because it has infinity many correct answers and almost all of them are non-informative (e.g. 27miles or 2 micro-meters).



You're both correct if we assume an "exact" semantics, i.e. "Paul ist 183 cm groß" means that he is exactly 183 cm tall. However, many semanticists assume an "at least" semantics, so that "Paul ist 183 cm groß" means he is _at least_ 183 cm tall. (He might be 184 cm or 190 cm tall, in which case he is _still_ 183 cm tall.) Why? Because being 190 cm tall entails (implies) being 189, 188, ... cm tall, as well.

For them, the normal "exactly" meaning comes not from the semantics, per se, but from the pragmatics, as Hutschi already mentioned. So for example, "I have 6 eggs" _means_ that I have _at least_ 6 (and entails that I also have 5, 4, ... eggs, as well), so if I have exactly 12 eggs, then I also have 6, 7, etc. However, _pragmatically_, "I have 6 eggs" implies (or implicates) that I have _exactly_ 6 eggs.

So, if we assume an "at least" semantics, where "183 cm groß" means _at least_ 183 cm tall, then we have downward entailing relationship: if Paul is 183 cm tall, then he's also 182 cm, 181 cm, ... tall. So if Paul is exactly 183 cm tall, then "183 cm" is the *maximally informative* degree d to which Paul is tall. (If we say 182, we're not maximally informative; and if we say 184, then we're lying!)

Now, assuming such an "at least" semantics, if we use negation, we should still have a downward entailing relationship. For example, if Paul has exactly 3 children, then we should be able to have the following conversation:

Q: How many children does Paul _not_ have?
A: 4.

Why? Well, it is not the case that Paul does not have 1, 2, or 3 children, because he _does_ have 1 child, 2 children, 3 children. (In fact, to be maximally informative, we would say he has 3 children.)

However, it _is_ the case that Paul does not have 4 children, or 5, or 6. But to be maximally informative, we would expect to say that Paul does not have 4 children, since saying any number higher than 4 would not be maximally informative, since 4 _entails_ all the higher numbers.

And yet "How many children does Paul not have" is still an odd sentence. Why?

So that's some of the background to the research I'm doing.  Your sentences with _nicht_ and _auf keinen Fall_ are very helpful, but I'd like to point one thing out:



Hutschi said:


> But the form could be used in special context, may be also as idiom:
> 
> As Savra wrote:
> _
> Wann fahren denn die Züge nicht?
> 
> _This gives context to exclude practically almost all of the infinite answers.
> 
> A: Der Zug fährt fast täglich.
> B: _Wann fährt er denn nicht?
> A: Er fährt nicht zu Weihnachten und am Neujahrstag.
> _A possible answer is: Sie fahren nicht an Feiertagen./Sie fahren nicht an Wochenenden.
> 
> _A: Es gibt Bauarbeiten. Du musst mit Umleitungen rechnen.
> B: Wann fährt denn die Straßenbahn nicht über den Pirnaischen Platz?
> _A: Sie fährt dort ab morgen Abend nicht mehr bis voraussichtlich nächste Woche Dienstag.



These are not really "degree" questions. You're not asking "to what _degree_ does the train not operate." Rather, you're simply asking for a set of days or times, which is not a degree. (Degrees are used with so-called gradable adjectives, like "tall", which have grades or degrees along some scale.)



Hutschi said:


> Auf keinen Fall:
> 
> a: Wie schnell fährt denn der Rollstuhl auf keinen Fall?
> b: Seine Maximalgeschwindigkeit ist 20 km/h. Er fährt aber auf keinen Fall schneller als 30 km/h.
> c: Wie kann er dann mit 130 km/h geblitzt worden sein?
> 
> (There was such a real case. The driver had to pay because he was too fast. In an experiment in the TV he could not exceed appr. 25 km/h. It was manually driven. Nethertheless the justice believed in the photo and not in the experiment.)



This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.  Thanks.


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## berndf

Well, but (3) certainly has _exact_ semantics because there are specialized forms for negative_ at least_ semantics:
_Ist Paul nicht einmal 1.83 groß?
Ist Paul keine 1.83 groß?_


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## Hutschi

There is a special case to express astonishment:

One of such context is
_Was denn, ist Paul nicht 1,83 m groß?
Ist Paul etwa nicht 1,83 m groß?_

In a multiple choice quiz, you could ask your original question:
Wie groß ist Paul _nicht_? 
a) 1,50 m b)1,83 m

You could ask the same question with "Wie klein ist Paul nicht?"


> _
> ... many semanticists assume that degrees are interpreted with an "at least"._



I think their assumption is wrong at least for German - because here it can also indicate the maximum.

There are additional words making it clear:

Warst du nicht einmal 10 Minuten unterwegs? (May be this is semantically a statement rather than a question.) "Einmal" adds the meaning that you expected a longer time.


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## brian

berndf said:


> Well, but (3) certainly has _exact_ semantics because there are specialized forms for negative_ at least_ semantics:
> _Ist Paul nicht einmal 1.83 groß?
> Ist Paul keine 1.83 groß?_



I think some semanticists would argue that (3) still has "at least" semantics, but that the "exact" implicature is so strong, that we tend to add adverbs like _einmal_ to cancel the implicature.

One example where _nicht_ in a question (without _einmal_) can have "at least" semantics would perhaps be the following:

A: Man muss 1.83 cm groß sein / 18 Jahre alt sein, um XYZ zu machen. <-- "at least" semantics because the meaning is _at least_ 1.83 cm tall/18 years old

B: Ist Paul *nicht* 1.83 cm groß? / Ist Paul *nicht* 18 Jahre alt?

A: Doch. Er ist zwar/tatsächlich (_in fact_?) 1.90 cm groß / 20 Jahre alt.

Is that possible in German? It is in English. We often give requirements in terms of degrees without "at least", and yet "at least" is intended, which provides evidence that degrees should be interpreted with an "at least" semantics.

In any case, yes/no questions with negation are really a different thing all together. They don't ask for a degree to which something is _not_. Rather, they ask whether or not something is _not_ to such-and-such a degree -- which is perfectly fine.


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## berndf

brian said:


> B: Ist Paul *nicht* 1.83 cm groß? / Ist Paul *nicht* 18 Jahre alt?
> 
> A: Doch. Er ist zwar/tatsächlich (_in fact_?) 1.90 cm groß / 20 Jahre alt.
> 
> Is that possible in German?


No, for this conversation to make only the slightest sense, you have to insert _(ein)mal_ after _nicht_.

I wonder how it is with English students. As a post-graduate in university I used to teach beginners in formal logic and at least for German students it is extremely counter-intuitive to understand "there as a" or "there are n" as "there is at least one" and "there are at least n" as it is normal in logic and mathematics. Most students would have answered about the truth value of the statement "es gibt 2 Primzahlen kleiner 20" "false".


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## brian

Hutschi said:


> In a multiple choice quiz, you could ask your original question:
> Wie groß ist Paul _nicht_?
> a) 1,50 m b)1,83 m



Yes, good point, but maybe that's just because it's different to separate the semantics from the pragmatics. When you say that someone is 1,50 m tall, you very strongly imply (implicate) that he is no taller than 1,50 m. As such, if Paul really were (exactly) 1,83 m tall, then you would never say that he was 1,50 m tall (because that's not maximally informative), and so most people would infer that Paul is therefore _not_ 1,50 m tall and choose a).

But that's pragmatics, not semantics.

If we changed the question to the following, and made it clear that they must choose one and only one response, I think most people would choose c):

Wie groß ist Paul nicht?
a) 1,50 m; b) 1,83 m; c) 1,90 m

Anyway, I'm not necessarily in favor of an "at least" semantics -- I'm just giving the general arguments.  It's a very complicated issue, though. But very interesting, too.



			
				bernd said:
			
		

> I wonder how it is with English students. As a post-graduate in  university I used to teach beginners in formal logic and at least for  German students it is extremely counter-intuitive to understand "there  as a" or "there are n" as "there is at least one" and "there are at  least n" as it is normal in logic and mathematics. Most students would  have answered about the truth value of the statement "es gibt 2  Primzahlen kleiner 20" "false".



Very interesting. In my experience, this "at least" semantics in formal logic is very intuitive. In natural language, not so much, but there are so many examples of "at least" semantics in English that it's quite easy to be convinced of it. Here's another example:

_For your final assessment, you are required to write 10 pages on a topic of your choice._

Most people would understand this as _at least 10 pages_, and not _exactly 10_, and certainly not _at most 10_.


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## Hutschi

_Ist Paul *nicht* 18 Jahre alt? _This can have approximately the meaning: I suppose that he is 18 years old. Is this true? 
But note: "Nicht" is here not a word for negation and has another pronunciation as if it were.

In this case, you can indeed answer: _Doch. Er ist 18 Jahre alt.

It is the same form as coll. "Ist der nicht gestern hiergewesen?"
_


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## berndf

brian said:


> _For your final assessment, you are required to write 10 pages on a topic of your choice._
> 
> Most people would understand this as _at least 10 pages_, and not _exactly 10_, and certainly not _at most 10_.


I have my doubts about German students they will understand this as "exactly 10" or as "about 10". My daughter who is probably the laziest person alive will certainly understand this as "at most 10 pages".


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## Hutschi

berndf said:


> I have my doubts about German students they will understand this as "exactly 10" or as "about 10". ...



I agree.

Brian wrote: 


> and (2) as "To which degree d is Paul tall?" Answer: d = 183 cm.



Here I misunderstood the question. I understood: Wie groß ist Brian ungefähr? - It was, maybe, a kind of false friend.




brian said:


> Very interesting. In my experience, this "at least" semantics in formal logic is very intuitive.



For me it was contra-intuitive until I learned it.


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## brian

Ha, that's very funny.  Thanks again for your answers, guys. I do have another question, though:



			
				Hutschi said:
			
		

> a: Wie schnell fährt denn der Rollstuhl auf keinen Fall?
> b: Seine Maximalgeschwindigkeit ist 20 km/h. Er fährt aber auf keinen Fall schneller als 30 km/h.
> c: Wie kann er dann mit 130 km/h geblitzt worden sein?



Now that I read this more closely, I don't quite understand the difference between:

(b) i. _Seine Maximalgeschwindigkeit ist 20 km/h.
_(b) ii. _Er fährt (aber) auf keinen Fall schneller als 30 km/h_.

I understand (b.i.) to mean that its maximum possible speed is 20 km/h, and (b.ii.) to mean that under no circumstances does (can) it go faster than 30 km/h.

But in that case, wouldn't 30 km/h be its _Maximalgeschwindigkeit_?

Or does _Maximalgeschwindigkeit_ refer to the maximum speed that it's _recommended_ to go, and not the max speed that it's _possible_ to go? And (b. ii.) refers to the maximum speed that it's _possible_ to go?


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## berndf

The maximum speed of 20km/h is an estimate and it can vary from individual to individual but under no circumstances will any user of a wheel chair ever go faster than 30km/h.


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## brian

How odd. In English, if we say _maximum speed_, we mean just that, regardless of who is operating it. That is, the max speed will not vary from person to person.

In this example, we'd probably say: _The maximum (possible) speed is 30 km/h; however, most wheelchair users do not _(or maybe _cannot_)_ exceed 20 km/h._


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## berndf

Maybe you could say the following in English which is kind of similar:
_The maximum speed of a wheel-chair is normally around 20kmh but certainly not above 30kmh._


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## brian

berndf said:


> Maybe you could say the following in English which is kind of similar:
> _The maximum speed of a wheel-chair is normally around 20kmh but certainly not above 30kmh._



Hm... I'm afraid not. That sounds odd, to my ears.

What that sentence says, in effect, is that (1) the max speed is normally 20, though sometimes more, and (2) the max speed is never above (more than) 30.

Both of those are problematic, in English. Firstly, if it's possible to attain a speed greater than 20, then 20 is not a "max speed", because here "max speed" has an absolute sense. You'd have to change the sentence up and say: _The maximum speed for most people is 20 km/h_. Here, "maximum speed" is no longer absolute, but rather varies from person to person. (NB: _normally_ is not capable of changing the meaning from absolute to variable, though I guess you suspected that it was.)

But then there's the second problem: we always define a maximum value in terms of what it _is_, never in terms of what it's _not_. So to say that "the max speed (for any given person) is _not/never_ above 30 km/h" sounds odd because we would rather say "the max speed (for everyone/for any given person) _is_ 30 km/h".

There is probably a generalization here: superlatives (or similar things, like _maximum_) denote a specific degree d to which something _is_, not a degree d to which something is _not_. That would explain why we would always say:

(1) The heaviest person in this room weighs 250 pounds.

and never

(2) The heaviest person in this room does not weigh more than 250 pounds. <-- grammatical, but odd

Likewise:

(3) The (absolute) maximum speed of the wheelchair is 30 km/h.

and never

(4) The (absolute) maximum speed of the wheel chair is not/never above (more than) 30 km/h.

Finally, it doesn't help to add _certainly_ or any other sort of adverb -- it still sounds funny. But I suspect that in German, there's something special about _auf keinen Fall_, which has this meaning of "certainly not", right? That is, these sentences would, I imagine, sound weird with a simple _nicht_ instead of _auf keinen Fall_, right?


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## SteveUK

brian said:


> What that sentence says, in effect, is that (1) the max speed is normally 20, though sometimes more, and (2) the max speed is never above (more than) 30.
> 
> Both of those are problematic, in English.



I'm not sure that this is problematic. Maximum speed can have many meanings. Take a look at aircraft V-speeds for an extreme example. There are max. speeds for gear-up/gear-down, max. speeds for different flap stages, max. structural cruising speed, 'never-exceed' speed (after which bits start falling off) - and many others.

Wheelchairs may not have V-speeds, but I'm guessing they have guidelines at least. The 20km max. speed may be the one expected in normal conditions, from an average operator. 30km could be the max. speed an engineer would expect before structural failure, and might only be achievable freewheeling down a very steep hill.

It may simply say 'Max. safe operating speed 20Kmph' in the owner's manual, and the witness was giving his professional opinion (or even guessing) that 30kmph could not be exceeded, even in exceptional circumstances.

I think we could only be certain of the meaning of 'maximum' if we knew the conditions under which it was intended to apply.


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## brian

Well, I'm not arguing that there can't be various maximum speeds. In fact, I share your intuition: in post #14, I mentioned _recommended speed_ (which I think would equate to your "safe operating speed") versus _(absolute) maximum speed possible_ (which I think would equate to the max speed before structural failure).

I find it interesting that you and I, native English speakers, would imagine such similar contexts. I think it's evidence that _maximum speed_ in English denotes a maximum degree d in some particular context, which may be "recommended/safe operating" context, "absolute (before structural failure)" context, etc.

The point here is that German seems to work differently. _Maximalgeschwindigkeit_ here does *not* mean "max recommended speed" or "max safe operating speed," but rather (as bernd pointed out in posts #15 and #17) "an estimated max speed that varies by person," which averages to 20 km/h, and the absolute maximum of which is 30 km/h.

It's as if the _Maximalgeschwindigkeit_, 20 km/h, is the average of a *set* of (maximum/very high) degrees (speeds), the *maximum* of which is 30 km/h.

In English, however, we would not call 20 km/h a maximum, because that would imply absolute maximum, which is contradicted by 30 km/h being the real absolute maximum. Instead, we'd have to qualify it, or distinguish the two maxima somehow: _The normal (average) maximum speed is 20 km/h, and the absolute maximum is 30 km/h._ But even that, admittedly, sounds a bit odd.


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## Hutschi

In this case 30 km/h is a theoretical maximum, you usually cannot reach under no "normal" circumstances. (You could exceed it if you fall from a mountain of course.)

I also wrote the principle. Of course it depends on the device.

20 km/h is rather a nominal speed.

In our case I estimated the numbers from memory. but this has no influence on linguistic.


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## berndf

brian said:


> Well, I'm not arguing that there can't be various maximum speeds. In fact, I share your intuition: in post #14, I mentioned _recommended speed_ (which I think would equate to your "safe operating speed") versus _(absolute) maximum speed possible_ (which I think would equate to the max speed before structural failure).


I can't agree with you here. _Maximum speed_ doesn't necessarily refer to an *absolute* maximum. Different vehicles can have different maximum speeds or different maximum speeds can be measured for the same vehicle on different journeys. And I don't think that English is fundamentally different from German is this respect. See e.g. this House of Commons paper discussion *varying *maximum speed of trains or here *varying *maximum speed of aircraft.

In other words, _maximum speed_ can itself be seen as a distribution, in this case with an average of 20kmh and a maximum of 30kmh.


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## brian

berndf said:


> I can't agree with you here. _Maximum speed_ doesn't necessarily refer to an *absolute* maximum. Different vehicles can have different maximum speeds or different maximum speeds can be measured for the same vehicle on different journeys.



I never said _maximum speed_ always had to be absolute; I said it depends on the context. Surely you and I must have different *individual *_maximum speeds_ on a wheelchair, because we have different physical abilities, experience, etc., provided at least one of us is unable to reach the wheelchair's *absolute* _maximum speed_. (If we were both able to reach the absolute max, we wouldn't know whether we had different individual max speeds.)

My whole point is that, unless the maximum speed is *qualified* in some way, such as *individual* _maximum speed_ or *recommended* or what have you, then its interpretation is *absolute*. Hence why the German sentence, _Seine Maximalgeschwindigkeit ist 20 km/h_, is impossible in English, because it sounds like an absolute maximum, which is then contradicted by _auf keiner Fall schneller als 30 km/h_.

So what you would have to say in English is:

_Individual maximum speed is around 20 km/h.
Individual maximum speed varies by person but is, on average, 20 km/h.
Most people do not exceed 20 km/h._
etc.

then

_But no individual can exceed 30 km/h.
No one can exceed 20 km/h.
Under no circumstances will any individual exceed 30 km/h._

My point is: there can be different maxima in English, absolute *or otherwise*; however, by default, if the maximum is not qualified in some way, its interpretation is as an absolute.



berndf said:


> And I don't think that English is fundamentally different from German is this respect. See e.g. this House of Commons paper discussion *varying *maximum speed of trains



Here the context qualifies the type of maximum we're talking about: the maximum speed on a *given day*. So each day of train riding will have a particular daily maximum, so of course the maximum will vary from day to day. This is not an absolute maximum.



berndf said:


> or here *varying *maximum speed of aircraft.



The subject of the entire sentence is actually _feature_, not _maximum speed_, but as above, context allows for this maximum to vary (not be absolute).



berndf said:


> In other words, _maximum speed_ can itself be seen as a distribution, in this case with an average of 20kmh and a maximum of 30kmh.



Right, like I said above: a set of degrees, whose average is 20 km/h and whose maximum (greatest element) is 30 km/h. But I honestly don't think this is inherently possible in English, unless you actually worded the sentence as such (by distinguishing the two maxima, e.g. individual maximum vs. absolute maximum).

I mean, you do agree that we're talking about two different _maxima_, right?

Let M be the set of all degrees (speeds) considered "maximum" in some sense (daily max speed for a train, individual max speed, etc.). Let m1 be the average of all elements in M, and let m2 be the the greatest element in M.

Then it seems to me that:

m1 = _Maximalgeschwindigkeit_ = 20 km/h
m2 = (denoted by) _auf keinen Fall schneller als_ = 30 km/h

This is not possible in English. While m1 is a *particular* (kind of) _maximum speed_, i.e. because it belongs to M, it is not *the* maximum speed -- because that is m2.

In other words, *the* (or *its*, in the wheelchair example) maximum speed, which is the absolute maximum speed, denotes the "maximum" (m1) of the "(set of) maxima" (M).

So there are two different concepts of maxima going on here: m2 on the one hand, and M (or its average, m1), on the other hand. English *the*_ maximum speed_ can only refer (absolutely, by default) to m2, and not to m1 or to M unless otherwise worded.


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## berndf

Ok, having clarified our positions, let's now return to Hutschi's dialog:





Hutschi said:


> a: Wie schnell fährt denn der Rollstuhl auf keinen Fall?
> b: Seine Maximalgeschwindigkeit ist 20 km/h. Er fährt aber auf keinen Fall schneller als 30 km/h.
> c: Wie kann er dann mit 130 km/h geblitzt worden sein?


This context is a bit different. Here there is only one wheel chair involved and only one journey matters. But we don't know the maximum speed for sure and the maximum speed can only be estimated. The distribution here is the range of plausible estimates with the most likely estimate of 20kmh and the highest plausible estimate.


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## brian

OK, I understand that, but the thing is that the sentence says _Seine Maximalgeschwindigkeit ist 20 km/h_. Period. This not possible in English. If we don't know the max speed for sure, or if the value given is an estimate, then we must say so; otherwise, the value is interpreted as an absolute max.


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## berndf

I think this is possible:
_His maximum speed is probably 20kmh but certainly not more than 30kmh._

In German you would normally also insert an adverb or adverbial phrase equivalent to _probably_. In this dialog it is implicit.


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## brian

berndf said:


> I think this is possible:
> _His maximum speed is probably 20kmh but certainly not more than 30kmh._



I think this still sounds odd, but maybe it's just me.  It actually almost sounds better with _and_.

Anyway, interesting discussion. Thank you!


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