Interpreting negation under 'yiqian' 'before' in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper investigates the puzzle of ‘expletive negation’ in Mandarin Chinese temporal clauses introduced by yiqian ‘before’, where the presence of negation often fails to alter the sentence’s truth conditions. Standard semantic analyses of ‘before’, which typically rely on selecting the earliest time point of the embedded proposition (e.g., Beaver and Condoravdi 2003 and Rett 2020), fail to account for the Mandarin data. To solve the puzzle, I build on Lin (2016) and propose a novel formal analysis where yiqian selects for a transition operator, which targets the unique non-infinite boundary of a set of time points. The proposed formal mechanisms correctly derive the apparent semantic vacuity of negation embedded under yiqian, while accounting for configurations where embedded negation under yiqian leads to infelicity. Finally, I discuss the asymmetries between yiqian ‘before’ and yihou ‘after’ with respect to their interactions with negation and Aktionsart. The paper concludes with a methodological discussion on expletive negation from a cross-linguistic perspective and avenues for future research.