Order across domains: a domain-neutral account of two Swedish prepositions for sequential order

Abstract The article presents a domain-neutral account of two Swedish prepositions, före ‘before’ and efter ‘after’, and discusses some of its theoretical implications. In contrast to a domain-specific approach, which delimits meanings along domain lines, the domain-neutral approach pursues generalisations over domains, aiming to subsume senses in different domains (such as space and time) under a single lexical description. It is argued that this approach has some merits over domain-specific accounts, as it is better equipped to handle certain uses of these prepositions. The study also shows that the behaviour of före and efter has further implications for metaphor theory. In particular, the commonly assumed extension of the Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors from deictic time to non-deictic time does not work for före and efter , because they lack a consistent spatial orientation that could serve as a model for the temporal domain.