Expletive Negation in Attitude Contexts Maria-Margarita Makri This paper examines the syntax-semantics of expletive negation in Modern and Classical Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Russian and Hebrew attitude complements. It shows that, contrary to what is standardly assumed, expletive negation is not necessarily licensed in Subjunctive com- plements. It is licensed by predicates allowing for more than one live doxastic alternative, it scopes above Tense, and it is in complementary distribution with epistemic modals. Based on novel data I show that expletive negation is not semantically vacuous; I propose that it is a weak epistemic modal that marks the contextually provided, ordered in terms of likelihood alterna- tives as equally likely. 1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to identify the distribution and the meaning of ‘expletive negation’ in the clausal complements of attitude predicates. Expletive Negation (henceforth, simply referred to as EN) refers to a sentential negator or a negative complementizer that does not reverse the polarity of a proposition 1 . If EN is a complementizer then it can be identical to sentential negation (e.g. Modern Greek min (NEG), Latin ne (NEG)) or comprised of a negative marker and a complementizer (e.g. Modern Greek mipos (NEG-that) or Latin qui-n<e> (that-NEG)). In (1-a) below min (NEG) does not change the polarity of the embedded proposition: what the speaker fears is that the addressee might forget something. In contrast, if min (NEG) does not introduce the complement of fear but a purpose clause, then the clause it introduces is negative as expected (1-b): (1) [Modern Greek] a. Fovame fear.1SG min NEG to it.CL ksehasis forget.2SG EN ‘I fear that you might forget it.’ 1 (Propositional) attitudes: mental states that we might have to propositions, e.g. belief, knowledge, suspicion, discovery, etc. Attitude predicates: believe, know, realize, think, discover, etc. Proceedings of ConSOLE XXIII, 2015, 427-448 http://www.sole.leidenuniv.nl c  Maria-Margarita Makri