this weekend

[Tom Kysilko]

I disagree.  I believe it is anything but easy.  Apart from those
individuals who have consciously formulated rules for their usage of
this/next, endeavor to live by them, and expect others to do likewise (my
wife is one of these), the de facto rules of even one individual are likely
to be highly complex, if not impossible to formulate, even assuming an
imaginary corpus with a large number of tokens.

For one thing, they most likely vary with the noun and with the
circumstances.
This/Next weekend
       week
       Thursday
       month
       month's expense records
       year
       afternoon [would you even say "next afternoon"?]
       corner (while driving)
       corner (while walking)
       stoplight (while driving)

Certainly propinquity has something to do with it, but how that plays out
must vary widely and idiosyncratically.

 --Tom Kysilko

LuNcHbOx writes:
> it is a real easy problem to solve......
>
> this weekend is the one coming up
>
> next weekend is the one after that (or if it is in the weekend then it would be the one that is next, hence the word)
>
> and last weekend is the one that had just happened.....