The behaviour of presupposition triggers in human language has been extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals. One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may not be challenged or refuted by discourse participa...

This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions, ‘contrastive’ statives, and an ‘affirmation/negation’ construction involving and not, where presuppositions are cancelable. It is proposed that these constructions, rather than having strict semantic presuppositions, have representations involving alternative sets in the sense of alternative semantics of questions...

Based on word order patterns in Czech, I argue that a cross-linguistically common partitioning of a sentence between given and new material is a result of an interplay of independently needed pragmatic notions: the Maximize Presupposition principle of Heim (1991) and presupposition failure. I formalize the intuition by introducing presuppositions by a freely insertable recursive operator which ...

Abstract Testimony is a source of knowledge. A speaker asserts what hearer may therefore come to know. Assertion has widely been treated as the exclusive or at least paradigmatic vehicle for testimony. I argue that we testify not only by asserting something, but also taking something granted within some other utterance. In philosophy language, this called semantic presupposition. The very reaso...

In this paper we present our implementation of a system of active logic that processes natural language discourses. We focus on problems that involve presupposition and the associated well{known problems of the projection of presupposition. We discuss Heim's largely successful theory of presupposition and point out certain limitations. We then use these observations to build our discourse proce...