Finite State Reasoning for Presupposition Satisfaction

Jacob Collard


Abstract
Sentences with presuppositions are often treated as uninterpretable or unvalued (neither true nor false) if their presuppositions are not satisfied. However, there is an open question as to how this satisfaction is calculated. In some cases, determining whether a presupposition is satisfied is not a trivial task (or even a decidable one), yet native speakers are able to quickly and confidently identify instances of presupposition failure. I propose that this can be accounted for with a form of possible world semantics that encapsulates some reasoning abilities, but is limited in its computational power, thus circumventing the need to solve computationally difficult problems. This can be modeled using a variant of the framework of finite state semantics proposed by Rooth (2017). A few modifications to this system are necessary, including its extension into a three-valued logic to account for presupposition. Within this framework, the logic necessary to calculate presupposition satisfaction is readily available, but there is no risk of needing exceptional computational power. This correctly predicts that certain presuppositions will not be calculated intuitively, while others can be easily evaluated.
Anthology ID:
W18-4106
Volume:
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Cognition and Computational Models
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Manjira Sinha, Tirthankar Dasgupta
Venue:
LCCM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
53–62
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4106
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jacob Collard. 2018. Finite State Reasoning for Presupposition Satisfaction. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Cognition and Computational Models, pages 53–62, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Finite State Reasoning for Presupposition Satisfaction (Collard, LCCM 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4106.pdf