Aspectual Variation in Negated Past Tense Contexts Across Slavic

This study examines variation in the use and interpretation of the perfective (pfv) aspect in negated past tense contexts across East Slavic and selected West and Southwest Slavic languages. Unlike West and Southwest Slavic, where the pfv + neg in past tense contexts allows for an interpretation denying the existence of the event at any past time, East Slavic uniquely interprets the pfv aspect in these contexts as indicating that the agent either planned but failed to realize the event or initiated it but failed to complete it. We account for this by assuming that negation operates either high (¬TP), as sentential negation, or low (¬vP), over the event domain. In East Slavic, the interaction of the pfv aspect with the past tense prevents high negation and enforces low negation, resulting in inhibited event reading. This reading implies that the event was expected or initiated but ultimately unrealized. We argue that the semantics of the pfv aspect in East Slavic parallels the semantics of specific indefinites in the nominal domain. The aspect head introduces a temporal variable t, which, via a choice function, restricts the domain of existential quantification over t to a singleton set, presupposing the existence of t, which cannot be canceled by high negation. Consequently, in negated pfv past tense contexts in East Slavic, negation scopes over the event domain giving rise to special interpretative constraints in past tense perfective contexts with negation.