Five factors in interpreting the last decade/century and the next decade/century in American English

Temporal nouns such as week, month, and year have two meanings: “even units,” e.g. from January to December, and “arbitrary periods,” e.g. any 12 months. The disambiguates the meanings of these temporal nouns preceded by last/next: Ø next week means “from Sunday to Saturday,” e.g. Next week will be fun, and the next week “the next seven days,” e.g. The next week will be fun. Decade and century also have two meanings; however, they do not usually combine with Ø last/next. Consequently, the last decade, for example, refers to either “the 1990s” or “the past 10 years.”Based on the analyses of tokens from the 1996 LA Times and New York Times corpora, this paper argues that the following five factors are involved in interpreting the last/next + decade/century: prepositions, tense, other lexical clues, pragmatic world knowledge, and relevance to the utterance time. Furthermore, two questionnaires containing authentic sentences from the two corpora were used to supplement these corpus findings. Thirty educated native speakers of American English living on the West Coast answered the questionnaires, the analyses of which support the aforementioned findings and also reveal that native speakers do not agree on what preposition to use for which interpretation.