Presuppositions

This course focuses on theoretical issues that have to do with presuppositions. There are a number of competing theoretical frameworks for presuppositions, and we will first give an overview of basic issues and representative theories, including multi-dimensional theory (Karttunen & Peters 1979), trivalent theory (Peters 1979, Beaver & Krahmer 2001, Krahmer  Fox 2008, George 2008), satisfaction theory (Heim 1983, Beaver 2001), presuppositions-as-anaphora theory (van der Sandt 1993, Geurts 1999). Then we will move on to discuss more recent theoretical issues such as incrementality, Maximize Presupposition, etc. It presupposes the basic understanding of compositional semantics, but there is no need to be familiar with the literature on presupposition or dynamic semantics.