Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study

Abstract This work aims to investigate the role of negation when it fails to reverse the polarity of a sentence, thus becoming “expletive”. An example is offered by the following Italian sentence: Chiara è rimasta in casa finché Marco non ha chiamato la pizzeria per la cena (literally ‘Chiara remained in the house until Marco did not call the pizzeria for dinner’, meaning ‘Chiara remained at home until Marco called the pizzeria for dinner’). Although negation occurs, the sentence remains affirmative, and the negative marker fails to trigger all the semantic and syntactic phenomena usually associated with it. Here we implement two experiments, an acceptability judgement task and a self-paced reading paradigm, to test how expletive negation is understood and processed. Our findings reveal a complex picture of expletive negation in Italian. Acceptability judgements suggest that it increases sentence naturalness. The self-paced reading data show no additional processing cost associated with expletive negation, unlike standard negation. By integrating offline and online measures, our study represents a crucial step towards a more comprehensive understanding of expletive negation in linguistic processing, which seems to diverge from the processing of standard negation.