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Parsing and presuppositions in the calculation of local contexts

What it is about

Schlenker's parsing-based algorithm computes the local context of a presupposition trigger from the words around it, without a compositional semantics. The authors use antecedent-final conditionals ("John isn't in Paris, if he regrets being in France") to show two problems. The algorithm predicts that the antecedent's presupposition is filtered whenever the negated consequent entails it, but the sentence intuitively presupposes that John is in France. It also predicts that the antecedent's redundancy makes "John isn't in Paris, if he is in France and Mary is with him" infelicitous, which is wrong. The fix they propose is that conditionals presuppose that their antecedent is compatible with the context, and that the local-context calculation takes presupposed material into account. This works for the incremental and symmetric versions, but it needs a multi-dimensional theory of presupposition and does not carry over to trivalent parsing-based accounts. The paper contains no counts; the argument rests on judgments about example sentences.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapter is 33. Implicature and presupposition, with 24. Coordination and subordination for conditional clauses. The code is prag/src/infer.rs (presupposition check) and prag/src/frames.rs (the clauses). Measure: whether Mova returns the correct presupposition for ten antecedent-final conditional pairs written from the paper's pattern, plus the control. Run twice.

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.10.7

@article{mandelkern2017parsing,
  title = {{Parsing and presuppositions in the calculation of local contexts}},
  author = {Mandelkern, Matt and Romoli, Jacopo},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.10.7},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.10.7}
}

References

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