UNTIL, Aspect, and Negation: A Novel Argument for Two Untils

1. Outline of the argument The puzzle of English until is well-known. Karttunen 1974 argues that until is ambiguous between a durative and a punctual negative polarity (NPI) meaning. Mittwoch 1977 claims that there is no ambiguity and that the two meanings are due to scope differences: NPI-until is in fact until above negation. Mittwoch's account relies crucially on the assumption that negation is an aspectual operator that 'stativizes' verb meanings (a position recently argued for in de Thus far, the correct analysis of until remains an open issue. In this paper, I revisit until by exploring first the semantics of its Greek counterpart mexri. (I use the convention 'UNTIL' to refer to the connective crosslinguistically.). Looking at Greek can be helpful because this language exhibits overt aspectual marking (perfective-imperfective), thereby allowing us to compare the two opposing accounts by testing the validity of the hypothesis that serves as the basis for one of them: that negation is an aspectual operator. Novel data are presented showing that mexri cannot be used with negated non-stative perfective forms. In this case, a distinct scalar NPI is used—para monon. This fact challenges the one until account, and provides grounds for a novel argument for two untils since we have evidence for a lexical distinction; it also shows that negation cannot 'undo' what overt aspect did first. This result is further supported by the usual diagnostics of stativity which show that negated perfectives, the English simple past included, are not stative. Contrary to what is believed (Mittwoch 1974, de Swart 1996), we will see that the two until and the scopal analysis are not equivalent under negation. The wide-scope UNTIL analysis, but not the NPI-analysis, posits a true stative reading which does not imply actualization of an event. While this reading is available with imperfective forms in Greek (negated and not), crucially, it is a reading that negated simple past sentences in English lack. This renders Mittwoch's account untenable for negative sentences with until. Karttunen's two-until thesis is, then, the only possible analysis for English. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, I present the basic facts about until and the details of the opposing analyses. In section 3 the aspectual system of Greek is presented, with emphasis on the perfective-imperfective contrast and the effects it has on verb meanings. In 3.2, we identify the Greek counterpart of durative until, mexri, and …