THE TWO MEANINGS OF 'DON'T WAIT'

Lauri Karttunen


Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program



Karttunen 1971 and Nairn et al. present a semantic classification of verbs that take infinitival complements. Two-way implicative verbs such as “manage” and “fail” yield entailments both in affirmative and negative contexts: “Ed managed to solve the problem” and “Ed didn’t fail to solve the problem” both entail that Ed solved the problem. One-way implicatives such as “force” yield positive entailments in positive contexts and no entailments in negative contexts, possibility modals such as “be able” yield negative entailments in negative contexts. There are a few verbs such as “hesitate” that yield positive entailments in negative contexts. For example, “Ed didn’t hesitate to voice his opinion” entails that Ed voiced his opinion.

The verb “wait” is a curious case because it does not fall into any of the previously identified semantic categories. Sentences such as “Mr. Schiavo didn’t wait to call for help” can be understood in two ways. If the next sentence is “He left the scene in a hurry”, it is clear that Mr. Schiavo did not call for help. The other meaning can be flushed out with the continuation “If he hadn’t dialed 911 immediately, Terry Schiavo would have died that day.” In general, the construction NOT WAIT TO X is systematically ambiguous. It means either NO X or X IMMEDIATELY.

It may be the case that the ambiguity is syntactic. Although I have not found any examples in the wild, it is possible that syntactically “wait” can take two optional infinitival complements, schematically, “wait (to A) (to B)” where A temporally precedes B. For example, “Neil didn’t wait to take off his coat to start playing with the train.” On this account, the ambiguity of NOT WAIT TO X is due to the fact that, without some external clue, we do not know whether X is the A or the B clause. The NO X reading is the only available one in cases such as “Neil didn’t wait to take off his coat before playing with the train.” The X IMMEDIATELY reading wins in cases such as “You should have, but you didn’t wait to open the package.” If there is no convincing evidence for syntactic ambiguity, we need to consider the NOT WAIT TO X construction as a purely semantic ambiguity.

Most of the time there is no uncertainty about which of the two alternative meanings is intended: “Don’t wait to suffer from hair loss! Stop hair loss before it starts.” (NO X) “Don’t wait to take advantage of Meriwest eStatements! Get these great saving benefits today.” (X IMMEDIATELY)

The ambiguity of NOT WAIT TO X appears to be a peculiarity of English. Native speakers of German, Dutch, French, and Finnish report that they cannot translate the ambiguity into their languages.


References

Lauri Karttunen, The Logic of English Predicate Complement Constructions. Indiana University Linguistics Club Publications. 1971.

Rowan Nairn, Cleo Condoravdi, and Lauri Karttunen, “Computing Local Textual Inferences”, submission to ICoS-2006 (Inference in Computational Semantics).