It’s Sunday, November 9 and NBC just broadcast a commercial for their Thursday night program ER. (Trust me, this isn’t a Cafe Society question.) The narrator said, “Thursday, on ER, blah, blah, blah. And coming next Thursday, blah, blah, blah.” So they mean November 13 in the first sentence and November 20 in the second. Why is that? When someone says next Thursday, shouldn’t that refer to the very next Thursday from today?
It really depends on context. If it’s Friday, Thursday means yesterday and next Thursday is six days from now. If it’s Wednesday, Thursday means tomorrow and next Thursday is eight days from now.
I guess it’s dependent less upon which Thursday is closest to us chronologically as which Thursday in the same week as us. I suppose you could imagine that each week defines its own seven days, and those days are the only ones you can use without specifying which week they fall in.
Of course, to prevent ambiguity, you could always say last Thursday' and next Thursday.’ Unless the person you’re talking to parses last' as belonging to last week’ and next' as belonging to next week’.
(And people wonder why natural-language computer interfaces haven’t taken off.)
Is that a standard interpretation? It seems ambiguous to me and I think that expressions like “next Thursday”, “last Thursday” or “this past Thursday” should refer to the closest Thursday.
I wrote for my college newspaper and I believe either the AP Stylebook or Strunk & White recommended using the name of the day only for plus or minus six days of the publication date and that one should use dates otherwise.
“Next Thursday” can mean either the next Thursday we encounter, or the Thursday of next week. Thus on Monday, when I say “next Thursday,” there are often people who think I mean the Thursday of this week even though I’m talking about the Thursday of next week.
But if I say one thing happens on Thursday, and then another thing happens next Thursday, the context makes it pretty obvious that the second is the Thursday of next week.
It depends even more on context than how you put it, I believe. If the context is that I’m talking about a past event, then it’s the preceding Thursday, regardless of how many days away it was. If the context is that I’m talking about something that has not yet happened, then it’s the next Thursday.
So, if it’s Friday, then –
“I went to the bank on Thursday.” means yesterday
but
“I’m going to the bank on Thursday,” means seven days from today.
I tend to assume “last Thursday” means the Thursday belonging to last week. Even if it’s already Friday.
For example, if it’s Friday the 14, I tend to hear “last Thursday” as Thursday the 6. I know it’s not universally accepted, but I still tend to think that way.