Surprise for Lauri Karttunen. Roelofsen, F. In Condoravdi, C. & King, T. H., editors, Tokens of Meaning: Papers in Honor of Lauri Karttunen. CSLI Publications, 2019.
Surprise for Lauri Karttunen [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
This paper is written in honor of Lauri Karttunen's seminal contributions to formal semantics, in particular his work on discourse referents (Karttunen, 1969), presuppositions (Karttunen, 1973, 1974) and questions (Karttunen, 1977). The present paper is connected to all these lines of work, suggesting that a long-standing issue concerning question embedding verbs like surprise, raised in Karttunen (1977), can be resolved by assuming that such verbs involve a presupposition that is sensitive to the discourse referents introduced by their complement.

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