On Until and its Uses

The points that I want to make in this paper are primarily about the English temporal adverb until. At first glance until appears to have two uses, a punctual one which is polarity-sensitive, and a durative one which isn’t. In recent work Iatridou and Zeijlstra (2021) proposed an account that unifies the two uses, drawing on Iatridou et al.’s (2001) notion of time spans. My goal is to look in detail at the implications of Iatridou and Zeijlstra’s account—hereafter I&Z—and to modify it in ways that (I will argue) are necessary. Eventually I will agree with I&Z on some aspects of their proposal and disagree on others. Specifically, I will agree that there can indeed be an account on which one lexical entry of until makes it seem polarity-sensitive in the company of punctual VPs, and polarity-insensitive with durative VPs. But I will argue that the details point to an exceptive-like semantics rather than the semantics that I&Z have in mind. As I make the case for this revision, I will also argue that the full set of facts requires positing an additional, purely durative until.