Not at all

A story on Live Science (called Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds) has a bit of over-dramatic headlining and a very interesting syntactic construction.

What the study shows is that some cats use a particular purr-plus-cry (which the researchers call "solicitation purring") to ask for food, a sound which is apparently harder for humans to ignore.

This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.

"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom."

That's not exactly "control", it's a learned behavior which is quite interesting on its own.

But here's the paragraph that caught my linguistic ear:

McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans." In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might be overlooked.

"Not all cats use it at all" - that's odd to me. For me, "at all" goes with a negated verb. I'd say "not all cats ever use it" or "only some cats ever use it" or (with "at all") "some cats don't use it at all".

I think I understand what happened: they wanted to say "not all cats" - because "all cats don't use it" has a scoping problem that would lead some of their readers to say, but you just said some cats do! So they change "all don't" to "not all do", which is fine. But then they wanted to emphasize that some cats never use it, but so they ended up with "not all cats use it at all". But even though I understand what they mean, it just doesn't sound right to me.

(photo is my Gwen, exercising control)