Sentential negation is generally taken to reverse the truth value of the clause in which it occurs. Yet many languages exhibit instances where an overt negator fails to contribute to the truth-conditional meaning of its clause; such cases are known as expletive negation (EN).

This talk investigates negation in Italian finché-clauses (‘as long as’, ‘until’). Within an event-based semantic framework, we show that the aspectual properties of the embedded clause determine both the interpretation of finché and the status of the negator it hosts: with ‘as long as’ readings, negation is truth-conditional, whereas with ‘until’ readings it is expletive.

We then examine the role, effect, and licensing of EN. We argue that, even when semantically vacuous, negation is not inert: it highlights the relevant temporal boundary and enforces a strict alternation between the two eventualities, yielding an emphatic interpretation of the sentence. By deriving the distribution of expletive vs. truth-conditional negation from finché’s aspectual sensitivity, we show that the presence or absence of truth-conditional negation is systematic and follows from the particle’s interpretive profile.