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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14: Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Stony Brook, NY
Edited by Lori Repetti and Francisco Ordóñez
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14] 2018
► pp. 5–19

Chapter 1
Expletive negation is not expletive

Evidence from aspect in Spanish

| Stony Brook University / Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

Spanish punctual hasta-clauses (‘until’) have been described as identical in meaning when containing or not an expletive negation, that is, a negative marker that apparently does not contribute to the sentence meaning. I show that the negation in the hasta-clause does in fact play a role in the meaning calculation. My proposal is that the semantic contribution of the so-called “expletive” negation is to negate that the eventuality in the main clause holds during the interval denoted in the hasta-clause; as a result, such eventuality is expected to hold after the eventuality in the hasta-clause is finished. The novelty of my analysis is the comparison of the aspect (specifically, the durativity component) of the eventualities expressed in the hasta-clause.

Keywords: negation, expletive negation, until, accomplishment, achievement, temporal adverbial, Spanish, semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The semantics of hasta-clauses
    • 2.1The semantic components of punctual hasta
    • 2.2Interpreting hasta-clauses
  • 3.The negation in hasta-clauses
    • 3.1The distribution of EN in hasta-clauses
    • 3.2The semantic contribution of EN
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.14.01cep
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