The Semantics of the Future

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 betw