Hedde Zeijlstra (Göttingen)
The complex beauty of boundary adverbials: in years and until
In this talk we discuss two NPI adverbials: in years (and its cousins in days, in months, etc.) and until. We argue that a lot is to be gained by analyzing the two in juxtaposition. We explore in years first, following Iatridou & Zeijlstra (2017), who re-appreciate the notion of domain widening in studying NPI-hood, and on the basis of our analysis of this item, we proceed to an analysis of until. Our approach will also permit a unified account of until, the duality in the behavior of which has led the literature to consider it lexically ambiguous. The commonalities between in years and our unified until will in the end of the paper also lead us to a rationale for why both these boundary adverbials are strong as opposed to weak NPIs.