Negation under Yiqian ‘Before’ in Mandarin Chinese and Cross-linguistic Variation in Expletive Negation *

Abstract

This article deals with the question of why negation under yiqian ‘before’ in Mandarin Chinese does not alter the truth conditions of the sentence. I propose that the complement clause of yiqian must denote a situation that exhibits a potential change of state from the prior nonexistent state to the resultant post-state. The semantic interpretation of yiqian is sensitive to this change of state and may select either the initial or final point of the complement eventuality as a reference time, depending upon whether the complement clause denotes the prior-state or the post-state. The addition of mei under yiqian does not change the meaning of the sentence because before the latest time of the prior-state is truth-conditionally indistinguishable from before the earliest time of the post-state. In addition to Mandarin Chinese, this article discusses cross-linguistic variation of expletive negation in some typologically different languages, showing that the wide or narrow distribution of expletive negation may be due to the [±interpretable] feature that a negation marker carries in a given language.