E-raamat: Semantics of the Future

In this study of compositional semantics, the author investigates the meanings of the ways that the future is discussed with a high degree of confidence. She first examines futurates (sentences with no obvious means of future reference but that convey a future-oriented eventuality that is determined, such as the simple futurate "The Red Sox play the Yankees tomorrow."), arguing that they have a presupposition that an entity, dubbed "the director" is committed to making the eventuality happen, where the director's commitments provide the bouletic ordering source for the modal. She then looks at the issue of will and be going to and their close relatives in some other languages, finding that will behaves similarly to simple futurates and be going to behaves similarly to progressive futurates (e.g. "The Red Sox are playing the Yankees tomorrow."). Finally, she examines futurates, will, and be going to in conditionals in English, and how aspect affects modality. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This book builds a semantics for several kinds of future-referring expressions, including will sentences, be going to sentences, and futurates. While there exists previous work on future-referring expressions, this is the first treatment of such a variety of expressions in a formal semantic framework. Arguments presented herein explicate the meanings of these expressions, and account for similarities and differences among them. Shared is a future-oriented model with a systematic alternation between inertial and bouletic ordering sources that provide a new way of understanding the age-old future Law of the Excluded Middle, evident in all of the future-referring expressions. A difference found among these meanings is the presence or absence of progressive- or generic-like aspect in a position higher than the future modal. These very high aspectual operators affect the temporal argument of the modal's accessibility relation, with detectable effects that can be used to determine scope relations in future conditionals. Copley's analysis thus addresses a number of issues of great interest to formal semanticists, from modal and aspectual semantics, to the mapping of functional elements in the clause, to the logical form of conditionals.