Reading for Th 10/15: Levinson 4.3.2 (191-198) (and optional Karttunen paper)

The required reading for next Thursday’s class is section 4.3.2 of the Levinson chapter on Presupposition.  (You’ve already read sections 4.0-4.2; section 4.3.2 is part of the same PDF document.)

As I mentioned in today’s lecture, I’m also posting the following paper in the “Readings” section of the website, which is optional for next Thursday:

Karttunen, Lauri. 1973. “Presuppositions of Compound Sentences”.

The Karttunen paper addresses many of the same topics as the Levinson reading.  In fact, the Karttunen paper is the original source for these observations and ideas, and constitutes one of the landmark papers on presupposition in the linguistics literature.  For that reason, it’s worth having a look at it.  (Some of the example sentences are pretty fun too.)  The paper assumes nothing more than propositional logic, so all of us are now in a position to follow it.