Journal ArticleDOI
Presupposition and linguistic context
TLDR
A recursive definition of "satisfaction of presupposition" is proposed that makes it unnecessary to have any explicit method for assigning presuppositions to compound sentences.Abstract:
According to a pragmatic view, the presuppositions of a sentence detrmine the class of contexts in which the sentence could be felicitously uttered. Complex sentences present a difficult problem in this framework. No simple \"projection method\" has been found by which we could compute their presuppositions from those of their constituent clauses. This paper presents a way to eliminate the projection problem. A recursive definition of \"satisfaction of presuppositions\" is proposed that makes it unnecessary to have any explicit method for assigning presuppositions to compound sentences. A theory of presuppositions becomes a theory of contraints on successive contexts in a fully explicit discourse.read more
Citations
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JournalDOI
Parsing and presuppositions in the calculation of local contexts
TL;DR: The authors show that parsing-based theories predict filtering of presuppositions where there is in fact projection, and triviality judgments for sentences which are in fact felicitous, but this is wrong: if he regrets being in France intuitively presupposes that John is in France, contrary to this prediction.
Book ChapterDOI
Focus and the Basic Function of Chinese Existential You-Sentences
Jianhua Hu,Haihua Pan +1 more
TL;DR: This article used data from Chinese existential you-construction to show that the existential construction can be used to mark not only a new entity, but also a new relation, and the referent of the postverbal NP is not required to be a new entities.
Journal ArticleDOI
Caveats in science-based news stories communicate caution without lowering interest.
Lewis Bott,Luke Bratton,Bianca Diaconu,Rachel Adams,Aimee Challenger,Jacky Boivin,Andy Williams,Petroc Sumner +7 more
TL;DR: It is suggested that science writers should include caveats in news reporting and that they can do so without fear of disengaging their readers or losing news uptake.
Journal ArticleDOI
Presuppositions and Quantifier Domains
TL;DR: A new account of presuppositions is argued for which is based on double indexing as well as minimal representational contexts providing antecedent material for anaphoric presuppOSitions, rather than notions of context defined in terms of the interlocutors’ pragmatic presupposition or the information accumulated from the preceding discourse.
Dissertation
The time of possibilities : truth and felicity of subjunctive conditionals
TL;DR: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2002 as mentioned in this paper, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., USA