---
title: "English Prepositions Expressing Temporal Limits: Semantic"
description: "The article asks how English prepositions marking a deadline (the final point by which something must happen or remains… 18 references."
authors: ["A. A. Shirshikova"]
year: 2024
venue: "Nauchnyi Dialog 13 (Научный диалог 13)"
source: "https://www.nauka-dialog.ru/jour/article/view/5571"
doi: "10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-127-144"
licence: "CC BY"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/shirshikova-2024-english-prepositions-expressing-temporal-limits/"
---
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# English Prepositions Expressing Temporal Limits: Semantic Features and Functioning

**Authors:** A. A. Shirshikova · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** [Nauchnyi Dialog 13 (Научный диалог 13)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/nauchnyi-dialog/) ([Nauchnyi Dialog 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/nauchnyi-dialog/2024/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-127-144) · [PDF](https://www.nauka-dialog.ru/jour/article/download/5571/2537) · [DOI 10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-127-144](https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-127-144) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4401973315)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The article asks how English prepositions marking a deadline (the final point by which something must happen or remains valid) are interpreted. The key question is whether the boundary moment itself counts as part of the allowed period. The author first reviews dictionaries, grammars and reference books, both Russian and English. Many of these give only general glosses and say little about this nuance. She then examines roughly two thousand contexts drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC), centring on BEFORE and BY. Each context is checked for whether the deadline information is clear. Where it is not, she asks what linguistic means could repair it. In about one fifth of the contexts, readers cannot tell whether the limit is included. Writers often add clarifying elements or rephrase the message, fully or partly, to remove the doubt. Such clarifications are most frequent in research texts, timetables and schedules, and legal and economic documents. The topic matters because misreading a deadline can lead to legal disputes or financial loss. The findings are relevant to teaching, translation, machine translation, lexicography and contract drafting.

## Key points
- The data are about 2,000 contexts with deadline prepositions, taken from the British National Corpus (BNC).
- BEFORE and BY are the core prepositions for expressing the end boundary of an action.
- Inclusion of the limit in the allowed timeframe is undecidable in roughly 20% of the analysed contexts.
- Writers resolve this ambiguity with clarifying elements or with complete or partial paraphrase. These are most typical of scientific texts, schedules, and legal and economic documents.
- The study extends the author's 2023 analysis of the same ambiguity in Russian prepositional constructions. It also contrasts dictionary and grammar descriptions with corpus evidence and finds the references often too general.

## Interesting ideas
- Whether a deadline's endpoint is included should be treated as a genuinely unresolved value, not something to guess, since a sizeable share of real usage leaves it open.
- Writers signal awareness of ambiguity by adding clarifiers or rephrasing. Such added material is therefore evidence about intended meaning and should not be dismissed as noise.
- The need for precision varies by genre: legal, economic, scheduling and research texts carry most of the explicit clarifications.
- Checking reference descriptions against corpus usage exposes gaps where dictionaries are too coarse for practical interpretation.
- If about 20% of cases are inherently ambiguous, a correct system must sometimes decline to give a definite answer.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (world): Store time intervals introduced by BEFORE or BY with an endpoint flag (included / excluded / unknown), so later reasoning cannot silently assume one reading.
- **I2** (frames): When building temporal frames, look for nearby clarifying modifiers or restatements of the deadline and use them to fix the endpoint flag, recording which phrase justified the choice.
- **I3** (learn): Stratify evaluation of temporal interpretation by genre, so that errors on contracts and timetables are measured separately rather than averaged away.
- **I4** (world): Audit compiled lexical knowledge for prepositions by sampling corpus contexts, and add missing sense distinctions such as boundary inclusion when the dictionary-derived entry is silent.
- **I5** (answer): Allow readers to reply that the text does not settle whether the deadline day counts. Include such cases in tests as items where a confident yes or no is marked wrong.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

Also on the byline: [Ural Federal University](https://ror.org/00hs7dr46).

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## Cite

Cite as: A. A. Shirshikova. 2024. English Prepositions Expressing Temporal Limits: Semantic Features and Functioning. Nauchnyi Dialog 13 (Научный диалог 13).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{shirshikova2024english,
  title = {{English Prepositions Expressing Temporal Limits: Semantic Features and Functioning}},
  author = {A. A. Shirshikova},
  booktitle = {Nauchnyi Dialog 13 (Научный диалог 13)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-127-144},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-127-144}
}
```

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## References

18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*