April 22, 2005: Kiyomi Kusumoto, How many UNTILs are there?

A well-known puzzle about English until is the following: Until modifies homogeneous predicates such as states and activities (e.g. He slept until noon.) but not achievements and accomplishments (e.g. *He arrived until noon.) The contrast disappears in negative sentences (e.g. He didn't sleep/arrive until noon.)

Karttunen (1974) argues that until is ambiguous between a durative and a punctual negative polarity meaning. Mittwoch (1977) on the other hand claims that the apparent ambiguity is reduced to scope differences. Recently Giannakidou (2002, 2003) argues for a two until analysis based on Greek data.

In this talk, I examine Japanese and try to argue for a scope analysis for made `until'.