On Heim's "On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions"

Handbook chapter

Mandy Simons
Louise McNally, Zoltán Szabó, A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics: Volume 100 of Studies in LInguistics and Philosophy, Springer, 2022, pp. 155-170

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-85308-2_9

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APA Click to copy
Simons, M. (2022). On Heim's "On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions" In L. McNally & Z. Szabó (Eds.) (Vol. A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics: Volume 100 of Studies in LInguistics and Philosophy, pp. 155–170). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85308-2_9

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Simons, Mandy. “On Heim's &Quot;On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions&Quot;” In , edited by Louise McNally and Zoltán Szabó, A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics: Volume 100 of Studies in LInguistics and Philosophy:155–170. Springer, 2022.

MLA Click to copy
Simons, Mandy. On Heim's &Quot;On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions&Quot; Edited by Louise McNally and Zoltán Szabó, vol. A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics: Volume 100 of Studies in LInguistics and Philosophy, Springer, 2022, pp. 155–70, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-85308-2_9.

BibTeX Click to copy

@inbook{mandy2022a,
  title = {On Heim's "On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions"},
  year = {2022},
  pages = {155-170},
  publisher = {Springer},
  volume = {A Reader's Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics: Volume 100 of Studies in LInguistics and Philosophy},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-85308-2_9},
  author = {Simons, Mandy},
  editor = {McNally, Louise and Szabó, Zoltán}
}

Abstract
Irene Heim’s 1983 paper, “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” is, first, a paper about presupposition projection. But perhaps its major significance lies in its role in launching the dynamic turn in formal semantics, whose central idea is that the conventional meaning of an expression is given by a description of how that expression updates a context. The fundamental ideas of context and context change that Heim presented in this brief paper are now part of the basic toolkit of semantics. At the same time, the paper established presupposition and presupposition projection as a topic of central concern for the emerging dynamic approach. In this commentary, I briefly describe the paper’s most direct antecedents, review its central theoretical innovations, and describe some alternative approaches to the formal characterization of contexts and to the analysis of presupposition and presupposition projection.