Verbal Aspect and the referential status of predications: Generalfactual and singularfactual ipf. aspect in negative answers to yes-no questions

Predications with a factual imperfective aspect may relate to the “type” of the denoted situation and inform us that within a certain time interval at least one “token” of the denoted “type” has occurred or will occur at some point (General-factual ipf. aspect). Otherwise, they can relate to concrete individualized situations without actualization of their aspectuality, i.e. they are not characterized as ongoing (Singular-factual ipf. aspect). This distinction is relevant to the negation of existential and explicative general questions. Existential general questions verify the existence of the denoted situation, whereas explicative general questions verify the correctness of the description of situations whose existence are presupposed. It will be shown that existential questions in the pf. aspect can be negated with both general-factual and singular-factual ipf. aspect. Explicative questions in the pf. aspect can only be negated with the general-factual ipf. aspect.