Keywords
pragmatics
experimental study
temporal operators
before
until
How to Cite
Abstract
The article concerns monotonicity properties of two temporal operators, namely before and until. Every natural language operator can be either monotone increasing, monotone decreasing or non-monotone. Usually, the first two mean that it preserves or reverses the direction of entailment. However monotonicity does not have to be defined in terms of entailment. In the paper three types of monotonicity are defined: with respect to temporal precedence, to the relation of being a sub-event, and to entailment. In this framework different definitions for before and until are proposed. Using these definitions I state exact empirical predictions, which are then tested in an empirical study.
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