Explaining presupposition projection with dynamic semantics

Anti-dynamics: presupposition projection without dynamic semantics

Heim 1983 suggested that the analysis of presupposition projection requires that the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions be replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials. But as several researchers (including Heim herself) later noted, the dynamic framework is insufficiently predictive: although it allows one to state that, say, the dynamic effect of F and...

Presupposition Projection and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs

Karttunen observed that, if the complement of an attitude sentence presupposes p, then that sentence as a whole presupposes that the attitude-holder believes p. I attempt to derive some representative instances of this generalization from suitable assumptions about the lexical semantics of attitude predicates. The enterprise is carried out in a framework of context change semantics, which incor...

Experimental Work in Presupposition and Presupposition Projection

Recent years have seen a surge of experimental approaches to the study of natural language meaning, both to get solid data on subtle phenomena hard to assess through introspection, and to understand how abstract characterizations of linguistic knowledge relate to real-time cognitive processes in language comprehension. The present paper reviews work in one of the most recent areas to see extens...

PRESUPPOSITION PROJECTION asPROOF

Procedural Dynamic Semantics , Verb - Phrase Ellipsis , and Presupposition by

In this paper, we study Verb-phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and show its relationship to presupposition and its failure. In doing so, we use a novel representation of VPE by means of a dynamic semantics approach, using an extended version of Dynamic Predicate Logic which includes procedures, scope rules and functions. We focus on the representation of the strict/sloppy ambiguity in connection with ellip...