NOTES ON UNNOTICEABLE NEGATION*

The paper outlines an analysis of a few constructions in Russiaт where the negation does not have a visible truth-conditional import. This happens, in particular, with sentential adjuncts with the complementizers poka and kak. I assume, contrary to many current proposals, that the meaning of poka- and kak-clauses is fully compositional, and that negation makes its regular contribution to their interpretation. I propose that configurations with and without negation may introduce the same interval but describe it in different ways. One description would be that an interval is free of events of a particular type. The other would specify an interval as separating the closest such event from the topic time. Predicates of intervals of this type can be reduced to the obvious logical equivalence P → ¬Q ≡ ¬P ∨ ¬Q ≡ Q → ¬P. This would explain native speakers’ judgments about apparent synonymy of the configuration with and without negation.