Running time backwards
From the
Palo Alto Daily News,
7/24/07, "Nephew of man killed by police to be tried as an adult" by
Mark Abramson (p.3):
This was the first officer-involved
shooting in San Mateo since Labor Day, when a homeless man wielding a
knife was shot. The last such shooting in the city since that
incident was almost 24 years ago, Raffaelli said.
In the first sentence we have an ordinary use of temporal
since, picking out the time span
elapsed between an "anchor time" (last Labor Day), denoted by the
object of
since, and a later
time (the time of the recent San Mateo shooting).
But in the second sentence the time span is between an anchor time
(again, last Labor Day) and an
EARLIER time (of the
shooting 24 years ago). Time seems to be running backwards;
before, not
since, is the appropriate P
(preposition or subordinator) here.
Still, the writer didn't just pull a P out of a hat.
Since is wrong (well, non-standard), but it's close.
The writer seems to have generalized
since
from referring specifically to elapsed time (along "time's arrow") to
referring to any span between two times. For him, the object of
since picks out one end of the
span, in effect a point of view from which the span is measured, and
that point can be at either end of the span.
[Added 7/31/07: Several correspondents suggest that the odd use here might be the result of careless revising or editing. Indeed it might. But then again, maybe not, and there's an interesting general question -- see below -- that arises from thinking about the example.]
Standard English has forward-looking
since
and backward-looking
before,
but no double-sided temporal P, one covering both directions. In
a roughly similar fashion, standard English has forward-looking
tomorrow and backward-looking
yesterday, but no double-sided
temporal adverb, meaning 'one day from today'. Such lexical items
aren't unnatural -- I believe that languages have been reported with
'one day from today' adverbs (at the moment I'm away from sources I
could check [7/31/07: Priyanka Chauhan has written from New Delhi to tell me about Hindi
kal]) -- but we'd expect them to be relatively rare, since
they're less informative than the more specific items. Still, a
double-sided temporal P would have its uses, allowing speakers to view
things from either end of a time span, the way the
PADN writer (who used the same
anchor time in both sentences) wanted to do with
since. No doubt I'll soon
hear of languages with double-sided Ps. Or of other English
speakers who use
since this
way (it's not in the
OED, but then
plenty of innovative non-standard usages aren't in the
OED, and shouldn't be).
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 27, 2007 02:24 PM