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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Thursday, November 14, 12noon in 460-126:
'Before' and 'After' are Converses
David Beaver (Linguistics, Stanford) and Cleo Condoravdi (PARC)
Since Anscombe (1964) it has been widely accepted that the temporal
connectives "before" and "after" are not converses. Whereas a sentence
of the form "A before B" is taken to universally quantify over times
when B is true, a sentence "A after B" is taken to existentially
quantify over both arguments. In this talk we will show how standard
accounts can be reconciled with the intuition that "before" and
"after" are converses, and, for most purposes, can be regarded as
denoting the two natural total orderings across times.
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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