The Semantics of Not Until

There has been a perennial debate over the English word until. In affirmative sentences, until has a durative sense and is compatible only with durative verbs and not with punctual verbs. However, in negative sentences, until usually collocates with punctual verbs and generates a sense of lateness and actualization. According to a unified account of until, until is a single lexical item, and negation is an aspectual operator that makes the meaning of a verb (even a punctual one) stative. However, an ambiguity account argues that English has two untils―the durative until and the punctual (negative polarity) until. The lexical composition approach claims that not...until is a stereotyped, idiomatic unit. This paper compares these three accounts of until and examines the semantic properties of not...until. Based on fresh evidence like crosslinguistic evidence and some common features of the punctual until and other negative polarity items (NPIs), this paper will prove that the durative until and the punctual until are two separate lexical items, and that the punctual until is an NPI.