Realizing Presuppositions in a Montague Grammar-Like Fragment of English

A complete analysis of an English sentence includes syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic components. Presupposition belongs to the pragmatic component. How to determine the presuppositions of multiple-clause sentences has been the focus of much work. Projection of clausal presuppositions is one method to determine the presuppositions of multiple-clause sentences. In this paper we present a new approach to the projection problem. Drawing heavily on the theoretical techniques originating with Montague semantics, our system maps sentences of a category-based grammar into a set of expressions of intensional logic: one expression corresponding to the literal interpretation of the sentence and the remaining expressions corresponding to the presuppositions of the sentence. The new approach correctly predicts the presuppositions of a larger range of multiple-clause sentences than previous projection approaches.