The Semantics of the Future

The Semantics of the Future by Bridget Copley 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 within a formal semantic framework.

Arguments presented in this book explicate the meanings of these expressions and account for both the similarities and differences among them. The analysis shares a future-oriented model with a systematic alternation between inertial and bouletic ordering sources. This novel approach provides a new way of understanding the age-old future Law of the Excluded Middle, evident in all 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 addresses several issues of great interest to formal semanticists, from modal and aspectual semantics to the mapping of functional elements in the clause, and the logical form of conditionals.