In this talk I present joint work with Arie Molendijk from the University of Groningen on the temporal role of negative sentences in narrative discourse in English and French. The analysis focuses on differences in the aspectual system of English and French, and their consequences for the interpretation of negation and quantification in an event-based semantics. A recursive rule for the introduction of discourse referents characterizes both quantificational and negated sentences as complex states. The notion of coercion explains why states (including complex states) can behave as events at the level of narrative discourse. The analysis is implemented in the framework of Discourse Representation theory (DRT) developed by Kamp and Reyle (1993).