Adverbial clauses with-igand the “until-puzzle”

Abstract

This paper is devoted to untangling some of the cross-linguistic puzzles that are associated with temporal adverbial clauses in general, and until-clauses in particular. After a brief introduction to the issues raised by the construction in Hungarian, the paper presents an overview of the complexities of until-clauses and prior attempts at analyzing these. Then, an account that was first proposed in MacDonald & Urogdi (2009a;b; 2011) for English is presented, and it is argued that until-constructions do not require any of the special machinery that has been proposed to explain their behavior. The analysis outlined accounts for the properties of temporal adverbials formed with until and for without reference to auxiliary concepts like “expletive negation” and “stativizing negation”. After this detour into English, we return to Hungarian, where until-clauses present a more complex picture than they do in Germanic, and we see how even these data can be accounted for without special stipulations. Finally, the...