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Description:
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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.
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