In this article, we discuss a recent dispute between two Canadian companies, Rogers and Aliant, which went before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. This involved an apparently ambiguous provision in an agreement between these companies, the interpretation of which was widely seen to hinge on the placement of a single comma in this provision, although the dispute was ultimately resolved by reference to the unambiguous French version of this provision. We provide a syntactic and semantic analysis of the linguistic facts of the dispute, rejecting Aliant’s argument (and the CRTC’s original conclusion) that the placement of the comma provided robust evidence of the intended meaning of the disputed provision and showing how two temporal expressions in this provision, thereafter and prior, contribute to the meaning advanced by Rogers. We also demonstrate the essential equivalence of this meaning to that of the French version of the agreement.
