Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers
By Márta Abrusán. 2011
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000).
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9066d6e7e7b87747da6abbbef76f65752a7b4d8b
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Artificial Intelligence
In Computational Theory and Mathematics
Citations in the corpus
- Logic in Grammar: Polarity, Free Choice, and Intervention (2013, background): “There have been several interesting attempts to do justice to this intuition (see, in particular, Abusch 2002; Chemla 2009; Abrusan 2011).”