Title
Interpreting Presuppositions Using Active Logic: From Contexts To Utterances
Abstract
Presupposition is a pervasive feature of human language. It involves many interesting interactions between the utterances of a discourse and the context of the discourse. In this paper we focus on issues of logical form connected with the interaction of presupposition and discourse context, and illustrate our theory with some implementational work using the active logic framework. After reviewing some of the major issues in presupposition theory we turn to a largely successful unified approach of Helm. We show how the main principles of this theory can be implemented in active logic. But we also find two serious difficulties. These consist in (a) a straightforward counterexample and (b) a type of discourse that we call a garden-path discourse. We maintain that both the counterexample and the garden-path type of discourse can be handled by our active-logic version of Helm's theory. This requires us to reformulate and extend Helm's theorey. Although this work is largely theoretical, both Helm's theory and ours have important things to say about the incremental processing of the utterances that make up discourse. And we present our theory as a specification of a processing device that takes logical form of a sentence along with current discourse context as input and delivers an updated discourse context as output. As an experiment, we have implemented portions of this device.
Year
DOI
Venue
1997
10.1111/0824-7935.00044
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Keywords
Field
DocType
presupposition, discourse, context, accommodation, active logic
Computer science,Presupposition,Logical form,Speech recognition,Artificial intelligence,Counterexample,Linguistics,Sentence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
3
0824-7935
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.67
1
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
John Gurney180.67
Donald Perlis230654.22
khemdut purang3323.12