An Implemented Formalism for Computing Linguistic Presuppositions and Existential Commitments

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal logical framework combining linguistic and philosophical insights to computationally determine presuppositions and existential commitments in language.

Contribution

It introduces a unified formalism that integrates Meinong's philosophy and Grice's principles within stratified logic for computing presuppositions.

Findings

Provides a tractable computational method for presupposition calculation

Unifies presupposition and existential commitment analysis

Uses a rich ontology and philosophical principles

Abstract

We rely on the strength of linguistic and philosophical perspectives in constructing a framework that offers a unified explanation for presuppositions and existential commitment. We use a rich ontology and a set of methodological principles that embed the essence of Meinong's philosophy and Grice's conversational principles into a stratified logic, under an unrestricted interpretation of the quantifiers. The result is a logical formalism that yields a tractable computational method that uniformly calculates all the presuppositions of a given utterance, including the existential ones.