# until + negative verb



## kman1

I just finished a study session with a teacher of mine and we got into a debate regarding English grammar. Specifically, we could not come to an agreement about the use of negative verbs with the preposition 'until'. This is the sentence that started everything: 

"Until you don't finish your work, I will be here" 

I immediately said that such a sentence is incorrect. But I quickly changed it and clarified by stating that it was rather extremely uncommon and strange for American English. He is not a native speaker of English but he does speak English well. I do not know the rules behind why the sentence is incorrect but I just know, as a native speaker, that I don't think I have ever heard such a sentence. 

I was trying to justify my point by looking at the definition of 'until' which is 'up to a certain point in time/event'. It would not make sense to say, 'You don't finish your work at five o'clock.' Maybe the reason is that a negative form of the present tense does not equal a certain point in time. 

I don't know. What do you all think?


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## perpend

I agree with you. It's incorrect, barring a very extreme context, but let's leave that alone.


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## kman1

But does anyone know what the rule is though? I know for a fact that he will not believe me without supporting documentation. I can simply feel it's incorrect as a native speaker but she is highly educated so native intuition is not enough for her.


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## velisarius

It sounds OK to me - if you mean it to say roughly: "I'll be here every day until a time comes when you no longer finish your work - when that day comes, I'm out of here." It would be  a strange thing to say.


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## kman1

He is adamant that what he said is, "a perfectly correct English sentence". So, that exact sentence is what I would like to figure out.


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## Thomas Tompion

kman1 said:


> He is adamant that what he said is, "a perfectly correct English sentence". So, that exact sentence is what I would like to figure out.


I think Velisarius has done that for you.


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## kman1

Ah. I thought he re-worded the sentence. 

There must be a grammatical rule to clear this up though since so far there is one vote for it being incorrect (American voter) and one vote for it being correct (British voter). 

I did add that in American English it is incorrect but he was still persistent. I am curious to see how other Americans weigh in on this. Being that the English he learned is British English, it may very well be correct in British English but as far as I know, this is not so in American English at all.


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## velisarius

What did your teacher imagine was the meaning of the sentence? If they wanted to make the sentence mean something else, then it may not be possible. 

I think perpend's "very extreme context" is probably something like the one I provided above. I don't believe it's a BE/AE difference.


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## rhitagawr

Interesting. The OP sentence sounds odd to me. It seems to mean that the one person has finished his work and so the other person is going to wait for ever. Perhaps the sentence sounds odd because _until_ refers to the future:
_I’ll wait until he comes_ – he’ll come in the future.
_I waited until he came_ – he came in the future relative to the time I started to wait.
But if you haven’t finished your work, you haven’t finished your work now. _Until_ doesn’t seem to work with _not_ or _never_, but it does seem to work with _no longer_: _I’ll stay until my services are no longer required_.
I agree that none of this constitutes a rule. I can’t point to any documentation. Perhaps it’s just one of those constructions which are grammatically correct but are never heard because they sound odd. There are instances where you can’t rely on the grammar books and you have to go by what sounds right to native speakers. Velisarius's interpretation (post 4) is the only one that makes any sense.


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## kman1

Well, it gets a bit complicated if you ask what he meant by that sentence. The reason is because that sentence was his translation of this Hindi sentence below: 
 <<जब तक तुम काम ख्तम नहीं करते हो तब तक मैं यहा बैठी रहूगी।>>

As I understand it, it means, "I will be here until you finish your work."  (I should post this in the Hindi area as well) 

As a learner of Hindi, the use of the negative verb in that Hindi sentence seemed strange just as it did in his English translation. But he said it makes perfect sense in Hindi (his native tongue) AND English. And that is where the confusion started.


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## kman1

rhitagawr said:


> _Until_ doesn’t seem to work with _not_ or _never_


I made up my own rule when we were in the heat of debating this. I stated that you can not use 'until' with a negative verb at the beginning of a sentence. I think that is the rule because I can not think of a sentence that goes against this. 

But I did think about this example: 

a mother comforting a child, who has just had a nightmare:
"Until you don't have bad dreams, I will be here" 

And the above does sound ok to me albeit I would not necessarily say it that way. I tried to emphasize to him that we just would not use a negative verb like that after 'until' at the beginning of a sentence. We would just re-phrase it and place 'until' later in the sentence. 



rhitagawr said:


> There are instances where you can’t rely on the grammar books and you have to go by what sounds right to native speakers.


And there is the dilemma. Technically, English is an official language of India and he did, in fact, grow up speaking it along with two other Indian languages. He doesn't claim to be a native speaker by any means but going by what sounds correct to 'native speakers' in the case of English (and probably other languages as well) may not be so helpful. But we are in America and I did clearly clarify that I was referring to American English.


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## rhitagawr

kman1 said:


> "Until you don't have bad dreams, I will be here"


This sentence sounds odd to me as well. You could say _Until your bad dreams stop_. _I'll wait until it's stopped raining_ is a lot better than _I'll wait until it's not raining_.


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## Thomas Tompion

kman1 said:


> I made up my own rule when we were in the heat of debating this. I stated that you can not use 'until' with a negative verb at the beginning of a sentence. I think that is the rule because I can not think of a sentence that goes against this.[...]


I worry when you put like things like this in a thread, because some learners may think it's a valid rule.

We all know that we can use *until* with negatives - *I'll go on telling you until you can't fail to understand.*  Turn such sentences round and your 'rule' is broken.

What makes _until + negative_ seem strange is that in many contexts it is conceptually impossible.

 The title sentence, *Until you don't finish your work, I will be here* is saved by the choice of tense - *until you establish a new habit of not finishing your work*. 

*Until you haven't finished your work* would be harder to understand, because *your work* suggests that it is started, and, therefore, either already not finished, or already finished - in both cases *until you haven't finished* is inappropriate.


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## Szkot

_Until you don't have bad dreams, ..._ could be rephrased as _Until you stop having bad dreams, ..._ with an 'until + positive verb' construction.  As a result, though inelegant, it makes sense.

_Until you don't finish work_ would be difficult to rephrase with a positive verb, which is why, I think, it is incorrect in UK English.


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## kman1

Thomas Tompion said:


> I worry when you put like things like this in a thread, because some learners may think it's a valid rule.


As far as I can see, it is a valid rule. That is unless there exists a sentence which disproves this.



> We all know that we can use *until* with negatives - *I'll go on telling you until you can't fail to understand.*  Turn such sentences round and your 'rule' is broken.


But reversing your example sentence would put it in the same boat as the sentence my friend and I are debating about. It just doesn't sound correct at all. And that is why I said 'at the beginning of a sentence'.


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## Thomas Tompion

Until he doesn't spend all breakfast yawning, keep sending him to bed early.


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## Enquiring Mind

I think we have to see this as a Hindi speaker's regional variation of English. I think it sounds odd/incorrect in the context you gave. In other contexts it can work, but probably wouldn't be the expression of choice for a native speaker.

If you look at some of the Indian newspaper websites in English, you can find various constructions that sound odd to a BE, AE, AusE or NZE speaker. It's usually a symptom of language interference; they are translating the grammar structure of one language into another language. It happens all the time, just as when Romance or Slavic language speakers say "how  do you call this in English?" (instead of "what do you call this?"). 

I don't speak any Indian language, but in the Romance and Slavic languages that I have had exposure to, the "until" construction normally takes a negative verb, whereas in standard English it doesn't.


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## kman1

Thomas Tompion said:


> Until he doesn't spend all breakfast yawning, keep sending him to bed early.


Good example.

Well, I don't know the grammatical reason why but I still maintain that my friend's sentence is incorrect.

*@Enquiring Mind* - I also mentioned the possibility that it could be a regional difference. But still he said that is not the case. He said it could possibly be because of the way British English is structured but he said it certainly is not Indian English.


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## velisarius

> As I understand it, it means, "I will be here until you finish your work."



If that's what you mean to say, then the sentence in question is incorrect - because it means something different.


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## kman1

velisarius said:


> If that's what you mean to say, then the sentence in question is incorrect - because it means something different.


Not me, him. I asked him if that is what the sentence meant in Hindi and after thinking about it for a moment he said yes. But not to worry, I have posted it in the Hindi area of the site here to get the thoughts of other native Hindi speakers on this.


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## velisarius

If he is not a native speaker, how can you rely on his intuition? We are discussing possible meanings in English. The Hindi meaning is of no relevance here.


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## kman1

kman1 said:


> And there is the dilemma. Technically, English is an official language of India and he did, in fact, grow up speaking it along with two other Indian languages.


But technically, isn't he a native speaker?

From OED:
_ native speaker   n.  a person for whom a specified language is their first language or the  one which they normally and naturally speak, esp. *a person who has  spoken the language since earliest childhood*, as opposed to a person who  has learnt it as a second or subsequent language._


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## rhitagawr

The position of the _until_-clause is irrelevant. Colloquially at least, _until-_clauses don't usually come first. _Until he comes, I'll wait_ sounds odd.
Perhaps we can look at it this way: _Until_ means that something's going to change; it describes a new situation. _I'll wait until he comes_ - he's not here but he's going to be here (new situation). In the OP sentence, the new situation is that I won't finish my work. Therefore the present situation is that I have finished my work. So the speaker will be waiting for ever. So the sentence doesn't really make sense.


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## Thomas O'Maley

For me, it is the meaning of the verb "finish" that is at issue here.
The meaning of the verb finish is inherently perfective, it suggests the occurrence of a one time event while the simple present tense suggests an imperfective situation that holds in time. The two interpretations clash in the sentence "I'll wait for you until you don't finish"
 How I read the sentence, the perfective interpretation is favored by the meaning of the main clause "I'll wait for you until.."

We normally wait for a one time event to happen, not for it not to happen. If the latter is the case, we'll interpret the event that occurs as a state that holds from that point on in the future.

_We're planning on doing this until it doesn't work for us anymore._

_Why not wait until it doesn't perform as well as it should and then replace it with a newer model._

Since the verb "finish" doesn't lend itself to a similar interpretation, for the original sentence to work we need to convert the event to one that we expect to occur:
_
I'll wait for you until you fail to finish._

In other words, I'll wait for you until the event of your failure occurs.


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## kman1

Another way, I tried to show him that his sentence does not make sense is I asked him what the reply would be to his sentence. He said the reply could be, 

'Ok, I'll finish it'. 

It does not make sense.


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## velisarius

If your friend is a native speaker of another variety of English, maybe you should take his word for it. The sentence means what his language community wants it to mean.


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## kman1

kman1 said:


> *@Enquiring Mind* - I also mentioned the possibility that it could be a regional difference. But still he said that is not the case. He said it could possibly be because of the way British English is structured but he said it certainly is not Indian English.


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## Thomas O'Maley

To understand why this sentence doesn't sound good it needs to be looked at from the point of view of the verb's lexical aspect, and whether the whole situation described in the "until" clause is to be conceived as a state or an event.  In only two out of the sixteen sentences I got for the query "until you don't" on COCA is the main verb non-stative, both times the verb "get". The stative verbs used in these sentences are: have, know, need, feel, notice, see, detect (I got only one result on BNC for the same query, also a sentence with a stative verb - "want"). The use of these verbs in itself clearly indicates that the construction "until + negation" is typically used to express a transition from one state to another. Here is an example from the movie "Tootsie" which nicely illustrates this point:

_I'm going to feel this way until I don't feel this way anymore.
_
Also an interesting detail is that the word "anymore" will very often be used in the until clause, obviously with the purpose of reinforcing the fact that the new state of affairs will hold true in the future time.

When an event verb is used in this construction, the situation described in the sentence will have to be understood as a series of recurring events which constitute a certain state of things (serial state in CGEL)

_You don't really know you're hooked until you don't get your drugs anymore and then you go through a withdrawal._

_Start off with a low number and keep increasing it until you don't get the error message._

_We're planning on doing this until it doesn't work for us anymore._

In neither of these sentences the event verbs "get" and "work" are understood as a one-time event - it is a state of things that obtains in time. For me, this is the problem with interpreting the sentence "I will be here until you don't finish the work". "I will be here until the moment you.." precludes interpreting the "don't finish the work" as a state of things that obtains in time, while the interpretation "I will be here until you fail to finish the work" is obviously not how this sentence could be read, because of the event reading of the "until" clause. It is obviously not a reading that makes much sense to English speaking people, as shown in this thread.

The reason is that English employs aspectual verbs such as begin, finish, stop, keep etc. to this purpose . For example, "Until you don't get the error message" necessarily implies that you kept getting messages, and thus the expected phrasing in such situation is "until you stop getting the error message". And that will be the case whatever event verb we used.

Szkot said this already in his post:


> Until you don't have bad dreams, ... could be rephrased as Until you stop having bad dreams, ... with an 'until + positive verb' construction. As a result, though inelegant, it makes sense.
> 
> Until you don't finish work would be difficult to rephrase with a positive verb, which is why, I think, it is incorrect in UK English.




Thus, to understand why the sentence doesn't work it is important to understand the difference between states and events - states obtain in time and occurrences happen- they take place. (CGEL p119) The state verbs like know, see etc. are not normally used as a complement of aspectual verbs stop, begin, keep etc. and that is, I guess, the reason the construction with these verbs sounds fine, as well as with event verbs when the situation is interpreted as stative. The event verbs, on the other hand, when used to report a single event are a common complement of aspectual verbs, as in this "until" construction, to say that "event didn't take place" as opposite to "event took place". The construction "until + negation" seem to be solely used when you want to indicate a transition between two states.

For me, that would be a grammatical explanation why the sentence doesn't work. This is how I understood the intended meaning in the end, and how I'd put it:

_I will be here until you fail to finish the work._



*I am a non-native speaker of English


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## velisarius

I think the answer to the original question is a little simpler than that: "until you don't finish your work" cannot have the same meaning as "until you finish your work".


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## Thomas O'Maley

I'm afraid it may be more complex than I was able to explain velisarius,  by no means can it be any simpler. This area in language, concerning  the lexical aspect of verbs and the interplay between the semantics and  syntax, is very complicated. Still if we are able to discover any  regularity regarding the usage it may help, and it seems that we have a  clear pattern here. The acceptability of the "until + negation"  construction can clearly be judged along the line states vs event  situations. 

I agree though that the possible source of this  phrasing may be in the grammar of the mother tongue of the person who wrote  that. Negating the verb this way in the "until" clause is a  characteristic of the Serbian language too, as Enquiringmind wrote in his post:



> in the Romance and Slavic languages that I have had exposure to, the  "until" construction normally takes a negative verb, whereas in standard  English it doesn't.




This is true for Serbian. _<<"Biću ovdje dok ne obaviš  posao">>_ is the translation of "_I'll be here until you finish the work_" in Serbian, where "_ne_" is the  word used in negation, and "_obaviš_" is the present form of the  perfective verb "_obaviti_". The "until" clause, the way it is translated  in English, isn't possible with imperfective verbs. The sentence <<"_Biću  ovdje dok obavljaš posao_">> with the present form of the imperfective verb <<"_obavljati_">> would translate as "I'll be here while you are finishing  the work", with the word <<"_dok_">> being translated once as "until" and the  other time as "while". 

English, which is morphologically poor  language, as opposed to morphologically intricate Slavic languages, doesn't seem so strict in regard of the acceptability of  imperfective situations in the "until" clause. For example, you can't  have an imperfective situation in the following "until" clause: "I will  not call you until I work tomorrow" but "I will not call you until I  work full time again." will, I think, sound fine. Anyway, it is  complicated, and it gives me a headache when I start thinking about it  cross-linguistically.


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## rhitagawr

I take Thomas's point and I think he makes a useful distinction. I took the Tootsie quote to be humorous. I'm not sure I'd always say things in the way Thomas suggests.  _I'll live here until I don't live here_, following the pattern of the Tootsie quote, sounds odd. I'd  probably say ..._until the error message disappears_ or ..._until you stop getting the error message_ or ..._as long as it works for us_. But perhaps that's just me.


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## Thomas O'Maley

Thank you rhitagawr 
 There are pragmatic considerations and ways how we interpret things that come into play when this or any other language construction is used, but those are extra-grammatical factors that we need to take into account. The point is that interpreting the "until" clause as a state that obtains in time is a necessary condition for this construction to sound good. You can construe a situation in which the verb "live" will work in this construction, here is an example from the net:

_And it got me thinking, maybe I just need to love where I live, while I live there, until I don't live there anymore._

It doesn't mean that every single state verb must necessarily readily occur in this construction, only that generally they fit hand in glove in the "until" construction.



> I'd probably say ...until the error message disappears or ...until you stop getting the error message or .



This was exactly my point rhitagawr. "Get" is an event verb, and both you and other participants in the thread naturally looked for the aspectual verb "stop" when you wanted to express the given meaning. It is a natural way of expressing this with such verbs. But with state verbs the construction with aspectual verbs is not available because of their inherent meaning so you use the regular negation with "don't". Check this example from Google Books:
_
 The waves spin me over and over until I don't know which way is up. 
_
You can't say "until I stop knowing which way is up" because the meaning verb "know" doesn't lend itself to a similar interpretation: you can't stop knowing, begin knowing, pause knowing or so.
But with event verbs you can do it of course:

_Marijuana won't be legal until the cops stop making millions off weed arrests._

You can stop or begin or finish making millions off weed arrests. The effect on the grammatical structure is exactly opposite to that with the verb "know" - I guess you will be more likely to use aspectual verbs and the construction "stop making millions", rather than "until they don't make milliions off weed arrests". The latter is possible as I said in the previous post, only you need to interpret it as a serial state, which meaning we can reinforce with "anymore" :

_Marijuana won't be legal until the cops don't make millions off weed arrests anymore._


Doesn't sound as good, but still acceptable to me.


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## tarkshya

I think I have something to add here. But since I am not a native English speaker, I would like to ask the native English speakers first if the following sentence sounds grammatically correct, and natural, to them.

"Till you don't finish your work, I will be here"

Second question, does the above sentence convey exactly the same meaning as "Until you don't finish your work, I will be here", or do you notice some subtle differences?


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## JulianStuart

Till and until are interchangeable, so there is no difference in those two sentences.  Until (or till)  relates to a time span whose end is defined by an event or an action (or something) .  A "non-happening" (such as someone not doing something like their homework) is not an event or an action or a change of state, so the sentence does not work in AmE or BrE, although it seems that it may work in Indian English, because of its parallel construction to a Hindi sentence.  Indian ENglish has some structures that are not seen in AmE or BrE or AusE or CanE (etc).


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## Thomas Tompion

Some of us seem to have forgotten the excellent point made by Velisarius in post #4, that *you don't finish your work* needn't be talking about a non-happening, because it might be referring to the end of a habitual occurrence.

Would *Until the cows don't come home, I will be here* sound quite so strange?

*Until you don't finish your work* could be pointing to what happens when you stop your habit of finishing your work.

We usually make such ideas more conceptually appealing by using a different form of negative - eg. *until you cease finishing your work*.  If your finishing your work was a matter of great importance and you were  old and often exhausted, this might be very understandable.


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## Thomas O'Maley

> Would *Until the cows don't come home, I will be here* sound quite so strange?



It would to me Thomas Tompion  As a non-native speaker, I'm not the one to decide the matters of usage, it's just that I don't understand it. To interpret "don't come" as a recurring event I'd choose "as long as":
_
I'll be here as long as the cows don't come home._



> We usually make such ideas more conceptually appealing by using a different form of negative - eg. *until you cease finishing your work*.



Aspectual verbs may be the most common way of expressing negation with event verbs in the "until" clause, but some other lexical and syntactic devices are also commonly used in this situation. For example, the negation can be transferred to the main clause, and we would get "event" reading, if that is the intended meaning:

_I won't leave until the cows come home._


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## rhitagawr

Tarkshya's suggestion (post 33) sounds unnatural, not to say wrong, to me for reasons I've tried to give in previous posts. There are differences between _till_ and _until_ - in particular _till_ is colloquial - but I suppose this would need a new thread. 
_Till_ (or the less likely _until_) _the cows come home_ is a set phrase. Any variation on it would sound odd even it's grammatically correct. It means that you're having to wait a long time against your will. _He wants us to sit here until the cows come home_.


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## JulianStuart

Thomas Tompion said:


> Some of us seem to have forgotten the excellent point made by Velisarius in post #4, that *you don't finish your work* needn't be talking about a non-happening, because it might be referring to the end of a habitual occurrence.
> 
> Would *Until the cows don't come home, I will be here* sound quite so strange?


I would submit that those fit under the "change of state" catch-all for the required end of something (like the habitual action).  I agree we would typically use a verb that is "intrinsically" negative, like cease or stop: "Until the cows stop coming home, I will be here for you".  However, that would sound much less strange if the until clause were second


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## JulianStuart

rhitagawr said:


> Tarkshya's suggestion (post 33) sounds unnatural, not to say wrong, to me for reasons I've tried to give in previous posts. There are differences between _till_ and _until_ - in particular _till_ is colloquial - but I suppose this would need a new thread.
> _Till_ (or the less likely _until_) _the cows come home_ is a set phrase. Any variation on it would sound odd even it's grammatically correct. It means that you're having to wait a long time against your will. _He wants us to sit here until the cows come home_.


There is extensive discussion on till and until here.  Interestingly it also has a significant discussion of the "negative verb rule"


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## Thomas Tompion

Thomas O'Maley said:


> It would to me Thomas Tompion  As a non-native speaker, I'm not the one to decide the matters of usage, it's just that I don't understand it. To interpret "don't come" as a recurring event I'd choose "as long as":
> _
> I'll be here as long as the cows don't come home.[...]_


But there's a world of difference between *Until the cows don't come home, I will be here *and *As long as the cows don't come home, I will be here.*

*Until the cows don't come home* implies that the cows are now in the habit of coming home, whereas* As long as the cows don't come home* implies that the cows are not currently at home, and isn't talking about a habitual action at all, to my ear.


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## Thomas O'Maley

> But there's a world of difference between *Until the cows don't come home, I will be here *and *As long as the cows don't come home, I will be here.*
> 
> *Until the cows don't come home* implies that the cows are now in the habit of coming home, whereas* As long as the cows don't come home* implies that the cows are not currently at home, and isn't talking about a habitual action at all, to my ear.



Being a non-native speaker, I may well be missing some nuance in the meaning in either of the sentences Thomas Tompion, I can't be sure. I was just offering my opinion from that perspective, and I can say that I still don't understand the first one well, while I'd interpret "cows don't come home" in "As long as the cows don't come home" as a state of affairs that holds. The context would tell in the end. Maybe the cows are moved to the mountains and I'm saying: "I'll be here as long as the cows graze in the mountains" --> "I'll leave when the cows are back in the lowlands". Or, somewhat different context and interpretation: "I'll be here as long (as the situation is such that) the cows don't come home --> I'll leave when the cows get in the habit of coming home .

EDIT: I have finally understood "Until the cows don't come home, I will be here" the way you suggested Thomas Tompion  That would be an inverse situation to my second context. It is understandable to me now,  and it only goes to prove that you can use an event verb in the "until" clause, as long as you are able to provide context in which the clause can be read as a state of affairs that obtains in time.


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## Thomas O'Maley

I apologize for double-posting, just one more comment on what Thomas Tompion says here:



> Some of us seem to have forgotten the excellent point made by Velisarius in post #4, that *you don't finish your work* needn't be talking about a non-happening, because it might be referring to the end of a habitual occurrence.



The point is, in my view, that the "until" clause with an event or a stative verb can't be understood as the beginning or the end of the previous habitual occurrence, but only as a new state of affairs to which we transitioned from some state that had held previously. "Until" clause with a negation can't indicate a one-off event, we must understand it as a newly established state, or the sentence won't work. The sentence "I will be here until the cows don't come home anymore" works, the part "the cows don't come home anymore" indicating the state of affairs that will ensue once the implied current state of "cows habitually coming home" is over. The word "anymore" precludes any other reading of the "until" clause other than as a state of affairs that holds uninterrupted from some point in the future on.


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