Expletive Negation beyond Romance: Clausal Complementation and Epistemic Modality.

This thesis examines whether Expletive Negation (EN) in attitude contexts is indeed semantically vacuous and which are its licensing conditions. By examining the crosslinguistic distribution of EN, I show that EN is not dependent on the mood specification of the embedded clause contra what has been previously argued (e.g. Abels 2005, Espinal 2000, Yoon 2011) but rather it is only licensed in tensed clauses. I show that EN complements are selected by predicates that also select for questions. I present new asymmetries between EN and that complements: more specifically, I show that epistemic modals are not licensed in EN complements, an attitude with an EN-complement cannot function as a felicitous answer, matrix negation has different scope in EN and non-EN clauses and that EN can be used instead of an epistemic in counterfactuals. Based on these asymmetries and the previously established necessary condition for tense, I propose that EN is an epistemic modal. EN actually indicates that the doxastic alternatives of the attitude holder are equally probably and thus the semantics of EN complements are very similar to that of embedded questions. Even though the distributions of embedded questions and EN complements largely overlap and the two constructions can be changed without any difference in the meaning I demonstrate that their distribution is not identical and thus further investigation is necessary.