Compositionality for Presuppositions over Tableaux

Tableaux originate as a decision method for a logical language. They can also be extended to obtain a structure that spells out all the information in a set of sentences in terms of truth value assignments to atomic formulas that appear in them. This approach is pursued here. Over such a structure, compositional rules are provided for obtaining the presuppositions of a logical statement from its atomic subformulas and their presuppositions. The rules are based on classical logic semantics and they are shown to model the behaviour of presuppositions observed in natural language sentences built with if . . . then, and and or. The advantages of this method over existing frameworks for presuppositions are discussed.