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Realizing Presuppositions in a Montague Grammar‐Like Fragment of English
Author(s) -
Surette Philip G.,
Mercer Robert E.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
computational intelligence
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.353
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1467-8640
pISSN - 0824-7935
DOI - 10.1111/0824-7935.00125
Subject(s) - presupposition , linguistics , sentence , focus (optics) , projection (relational algebra) , semantics (computer science) , interpretation (philosophy) , computer science , mathematics , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy , algorithm , physics , programming language , optics
A complete analysis of an English sentence includes syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic components. Presupposition belongs to the pragmatic component. How to determine the presuppositions of multiple‐clause sentences has been the focus of much work. Projection of clausal presuppositions is one method to determine the presuppositions of multiple‐clause sentences. In this paper we present a new approach to the projection problem. Drawing heavily on the theoretical techniques originating with Montague semantics, our system maps sentences of a category‐based grammar into a set of expressions of intensional logic: one expression corresponding to the literal interpretation of the sentence and the remaining expressions corresponding to the presuppositions of the sentence. The new approach correctly predicts the presuppositions of a larger range of multiple‐clause sentences than previous projection approaches.