The Interpretation of Until-Construction

The purpose of this paper is to seek an adequate interpretation of until-construction against the two existing analyses (one is double-until analysis, the other is durative analysis ). I attempt to provide an alternative analysis, in which there is only one kind of until. I will show that a unified treatment of until is available, once it is recognized that this item is a kind of ordering operator. Of course it is inevitable that there is a difference of interpretations of until-constructions, depending on whether the until is used with a positive verb or with a negative verb. Until is analyzed as a binary operator which orders its arguments, A and B, but at the same time I refer to the cases in which argument A or not-A may be cancelled. The primary idea in this analysis is that the presence of until refers to the endpoint of an eventuality and implies a reversal of the eventuality at that point. The hypothesis for an adequate analysis of until hinges on the following two-fold claim: the until with a positive verb (usually durative verbs) generally represents the stopping of argument A at the switching point, plus the possible implicature of the duration of argument A, whereas the until with a negative verb (usually punctual verbs) usually represents the beginning of argument A at the switching point, plus the possible implicature of the duration of not-A.