I promise not to do it, I swear not to do it. Is there a double meaning here?

Question

"I promise [pause] not to do it"

seems to me equivalent to

"I promise I won't do it".

However,

"I promise not [pause] to do it"

seems to me equivalent to

"I do not promise I will do it" (i.e. I cannot guarantee I will do it, maybe I will do it)

Is there a double meaning here? If so, all promises constructed that way ("I promise not to") may be interpreted as deceitful, treacherous, untrustworthy?

EDIT Just to clarify. The reason I am asking is that I saw a movie where the guy said "I promise not [pause] to kill X" and then he asked someone else to do it for him, thus violating the spirit of his promise (i.e. he wouldn't have X killed), but not the letter because he didn't actually do it himself. My impression, while I was watching the movie, was that the pause was deliberate, the guy was actually trying to hide a lie in his promise. This behaviour is not unheard of: in Ancient Greece oracles would pronounce obscure prophecies such that whatever happened the oracle would have been seen as having guessed. My question is about the grammatical structure of a sentence starting with "I promise not to" and the possibility to use it, consciously, to hide one's intentions.

Answer 1

No.

In Modern English, negation of the main clause requires subject/auxiliary inversion, with DO- support if no auxiliary is present; the only exception is copulation with BE. I VERB not has not been employed to express denial of I VERB since the 17th century, except in consciously archaizing literary contexts; in other contexts it will not bear the interpretation you suggest.

Answer 2

Pretty much, no.

Okay, "I promise not" does as a clause on its own mean "I do not promise". This is called "simple negation", and is today unusual.

There was a fad for a stressed form of negation that is superficially similar, being used sarcastically in the late 80s through to the 90s, associated in particular with the television show Wayne's World where all the linguistic games they played showed great erudition and imagination—NOT! This recent variant though insists on great vocal or typographic stress being put on the word not which never makes it irritating—NOT!

The style goes back further than that fad, and indeed Wayne and Garth's antecedents include George Eliot. Here the emphasis would be milder, but there was still a clearly stress separation.

Note however that the not follows a whole clause or sentence, and is quite strongly emphasised.

Even with Early Modern English use of "I promise not", one would avoid ambiguity, either using the more modern negative "I do not promise" or making the second clause clearer, "I promise I won't do that".

And if you failed to do so, you would of course be speaking to someone else who spoke Early Modern English, so if the wording, along with stress and context, didn't make a clear statement they might ask you to rephrase. And if you refused, they'd accuse you of being Jesuitical in your promises—this being a time when Jesuitical would be a favoured term for a devious lie hidden in a promise.

Today, you can only really use the simple negative on its own ("I promise not.") or with a flourish ("I promise not!") and even then it'd be a matter of using the unusual for effect.

The normal way to negate is to add not after the first auxiliary. If there is no such auxiliary, you add one; "I do not promise".

And as such, "I promise not to do it" unambiguously means "I promise that I will not do it".