Presupposition in Lexical Analysis and Discourse

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-70-A-0362-0003.Recent research in linguistic analysis of presuppositions has provided numerous indications of the role of presupposition in lexical analysis. Still others have argued there is no distinction between meaning and the presupposition of a word. In this paper I discuss both issues of what presuppositions are related to lexical analysis and what happens to these presupposition in discourse. Finally, I comment on how this knowledge could be made available to a natural language understanding program.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator