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A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal SemanticsOn Heim’s “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions”

A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics: On Heim’s “On the Projection Problem for... [Irene Heim’s 1983 paper, “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” is, first, a paper about presupposition projection. But perhaps its major significance lies in its role in launching the dynamic turn in formal semantics, whose central idea is that the conventional meaning of an expression is given by a description of how that expression updates a context. The fundamental ideas of context and context change that Heim presented in this brief paper are now part of the basic toolkit of semantics. At the same time, the paper established presupposition and presupposition projection as a topic of central concern for the emerging dynamic approach. In this commentary, I briefly describe the paper’s most direct antecedents, review its central theoretical innovations, and describe some alternative approaches to the formal characterization of contexts and to the analysis of presupposition and presupposition projection.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal SemanticsOn Heim’s “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions”

Part of the Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy Book Series (volume 100)
Editors: McNally, Louise; Szabó, Zoltán Gendler

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
ISBN
978-3-030-85307-5
Pages
155 –170
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-85308-2_9
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Irene Heim’s 1983 paper, “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” is, first, a paper about presupposition projection. But perhaps its major significance lies in its role in launching the dynamic turn in formal semantics, whose central idea is that the conventional meaning of an expression is given by a description of how that expression updates a context. The fundamental ideas of context and context change that Heim presented in this brief paper are now part of the basic toolkit of semantics. At the same time, the paper established presupposition and presupposition projection as a topic of central concern for the emerging dynamic approach. In this commentary, I briefly describe the paper’s most direct antecedents, review its central theoretical innovations, and describe some alternative approaches to the formal characterization of contexts and to the analysis of presupposition and presupposition projection.]

Published: Aug 6, 2022

Keywords: Presupposition; Projection; Dynamic semantics; Context change

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