Processing standard and expletive negation: An eye-tracking study on Italian temporal and causal clauses

Natural language sometimes expresses negation in rather puzzlingly different forms. Different from Standard Negation (SN), Expletive Negation (EN) involves a negative marker that does not affect the truth conditions of a sentence. The theoretical literature debates whether EN is a semantically empty element or a negative operator. This paper addresses this question by investigating the processing of EN and SN against affirmative sentences through an eye- tracking while reading experiment. EN is presented in Italian temporal clauses (It. Rimarrò qui finché Gianni non.EN verrà alla festa; Eng. ‘I will stay here until Gianni comes to the party.’) and SN in Italian causal clauses (It. Chiara è rimasta in casa perché Marco non.SN ha chiamato la pizzeria; Eng. ‘Chiara remained in the house because Marco did not call the pizzeria’). The results reveal distinct processing profiles for EN and SN: (i) both types of negation showed increased processing costs in early measures (gaze duration) on the verb under negation scope; (ii) however, EN differed from SN in late measures, showing no additional processing cost in total reading time compared to affirmative sentences, while SN maintained elevated processing demands. These findings suggest that EN, though not truth-functional, implies early processing cost, which may suggest its lexical non-emptiness and its integration as a syntactic negative operator. Meanwhile, its lack of impact on later measures confirms that the difference from SN emerges at the level of propositional meaning. The study offers empirical evidence on EN and novel insights into the cognitive processing of negation.