the politics of "yes" and "no"

"Barton" (not his real name), an American dude who works two doors down from me, and who speaks a stratospherically high level of Korean, came into our office to ask people some grammar questions. He was putting together a video script (presumably, he would be the star of the video, speaking in both English and Korean) about the natural use of "yes" and "no" in English. He started off by talking with the native-speaker English teachers, but apparently, the nature of his questions became too abstruse, so the native speakers referred Barton over to me since I am now considered the local grammar deity.

Barton's video script showed mini-dialogues like the following (these aren't exact quotes):

A: You don't like coffee?
B: No, I don't like coffee.

A: You don't like coffee?
B: No, I do like coffee!

A: You don't like coffee?
B: Yeah, I do like coffee!

The more closely I looked at these dialogues, the more complicated I realized the situation was. Barton's basic question was whether these dialogues all sounded natural. I gave him a flat "yes" to that question: any pair of actors could read the above lines in such a way as to sound perfectly natural, indicating that the English itself was perfectly natural. But Barton also had to include in his script a thorough explanation for what was going on with the anglophone way of handling "yes" and "no."

Normally, when I explain the difference between the Korean and the anglophone way of handling "yes" and "no," I keep it simple: Koreans use "yes/no" to respond to the truth-value of the statement or question; anglophones respond to the grammatical value of the sentence. As we'll discuss in a bit, this is an oversimplification, but my terse explanation does cover a large swath of conversational situations.

The Korean Way
Teacher: You didn't do your homework?
Student: Yes, I didn't. (Yes = affirming the truth-value of the teacher's question)

The Anglophone Way
Teacher: You didn't do your homework?
Student: No, I didn't. (No = affirming the grammatical value of the teacher's question)

In both cases, the students are affirming that they didn't do their homework. So an American student answers "no" in confirmatory response to the grammatically negative "didn't" couched inside the teacher's question. A Korean student, meanwhile, takes in the entire question, evaluating it in light of its factuality, then issuing a "yes" to affirm or confirm that factuality (i.e., its truth-value).

Watching English-language movies in a Korean theater often means seeing Korean subtitles that say the seeming opposite of what the character on screen is saying.

Actual Dialogue (OK, not actually in the real movie, but you get my drift)
Pippin: We aren't going to survive this battle, are we?
Gandalf: No, Pippin, I believe we shan't. (confirmatory "no," paralleling Pippin's negative grammar)

Korean-subtitled Dialogue
Pippin: We aren't going to survive this battle, are we?
Gandalf: Yes, Pippin, I believe we shan't. (confirmatory "yes" affirming the truth that they won't survive)

It's a bit jarring to see that "yes" in subtitle form, but once you understand the basic Korean/anglophone difference discussed above, it makes sense. That said, Barton's mini-dialogues showed me that there's more to the matter of "yes" and "no" than truth-value versus grammatical value. Let's look again at Barton's dialogues:

A: You don't like coffee?
B: No, I don't like coffee.

A: You don't like coffee?
B: No, I do like coffee!

A: You don't like coffee?
B: Yeah, I do like coffee!

The first dialogue gives us a confirmatory "no." The second dialogue, however, gives us a "no" of contradiction! A simple change in the tone of one's voice is sufficient to alert the interlocutor that a denial, rebuttal, demurral, or refutation is forthcoming. This is strengthened by the phatic "do" that follows up the "no." And to make things even weirder, the third dialogue begins with a "yes" of contradiction as well, meaning that "yes" and "no" can, in certain instances, mean the same thing!

I mentioned to Barton that the French solved the "yes" problem by introducing a second way to say "yes" when contradicting someone: the word "si" (but without the acute accent that would make it the Spanish "Sí"), which is specifically a "yes" of denial/refutation. So a French dialogue would look a lot like the third dialogue above:

A: Tu n'aimes pas le café?
B: Si, si! J'aime bien le café!

A real asshole of a hair-splitter might argue that there exists a subtle, nuanced difference between the "no" in Barton's second dialogue and the "yes" in the third, but I'd say that that difference is vanishingly small. In those dialogues, "no" and "yes" respectively serve the same purpose, i.e., that of contradiction or disconfirmation, and that's the most salient fact.

So we have several species of "yes" and "no": a "yes" of confirmation/affirmation (not shown in any of the above dialogues), a "yes" of contradiction, a "no" of confirmation/affirmation, and a "no" of contradiction. Once I had made this clear to Barton (and, frankly, to myself, because my talk with Barton was making these issues clearer to me the more we explored his video script), we realized that Barton's current explanation of "yes" and "no" would need to be greatly expanded. And as I thought more about my old, simple way of explaining the differences between the use of "yes" and "no" by Koreans and anglophones, I began to realize that my explanation, too, would need some tinkering to make it more comprehensive.

It doesn't help matters that, in 2018, one of our dumber idiomatic expressions is, "Yyyyyeah, no." Years ago, I was on a train in France when I heard one teenage girl say, "Bon, 'fin, oui, 'fin, non!" She kept repeating that expression as she babbled with her friends; it was obviously an attempt at being comically quirky. But it was damn annoying, much like "Yyyyyeah, no."