Lauri Juhani Karttunen was an

adjunct professor An adjunct professor is a type of academic appointment in higher education who does not work at the establishment full-time. The terms of this appointment and the job security of the tenure vary in different parts of the world, however the genera ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...

and an ACL Fellow. He died in 2022.

Career

Karttunen received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

in the 1970s he worked mostly on semantics. He published a series of seminal papers on discourse referents,

presupposition In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include ...

s, implicative verbs, conventional implicatures, and questions. In the 1980s Karttunen became, along with Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, and

Kimmo Koskenniemi Kimmo Matti Koskenniemi (born 7 September 1945) is the inventor of finite-state two-level models for computational phonology and morphology. He was a professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. In the early 1980s ...

, one of the pioneers in computational linguistics on the application of finite-state transducers to phonology and morphology. Karttunen and Kenneth R. Beesley published a textbook on Finite State Morphology and a set of applications for creating morphological analyzers. Commercial versions of the finite-state technology developed by Karttunen and his colleagues at PARC an
XRCE
have been licensed by Xerox to many companies including SAP and Microsoft. Karttunen retired from PARC in 2011. He worked o
Language and Natural Reasoning
at CSLI.

Honors

The Association for Computational Linguistics ( ACL) gives each year at its Annual Meeting a "Lifetime Achievement Award." At the age of 66, Karttunen became so far the youngest recipient of the award at the 45th Meeting in Prague in 2007. In 2009 the Indiana Linguistics Department gave Karttunen
Distinguished Alumni Award
In 2011 ACL created an ACL Fellows Program. Karttunen was one of the seventeen selected for the founding group of ACL Fellows "whose contributions to the field have been most extraordinary." The Europea
META-NET organization
awarded Karttunen's XFST (Xerox Finite-State Toolkit) application
META-Seal of Recognition
at th
2012 Meeting
in Brussels "for software products and services that actively contribute to the European Multilingual Information Society."

Selected articles

Discourse Referents.
In ''Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics''. Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), Vol. III, pages 20–39. Routledge, 2003. Also in ''Syntax and Semantics 7: Notes from the Linguistic Underground'', 363-85, J. D. McCawley (ed.), Academic Press, New York 1976. The first published version of the paper appeared in th
Proceedings of Coling'69

Syntax and Semantics of Questions.
In ''Formal Semantics. The Essential Readings.'' Paul Portner and Barbara H. Partee (eds.), pages 382–420. Blackwell, 2003. Also in ''Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics.'' Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), Vol. V, pages 207–249. Routledge, 2003 and in Questions, H. Hiz (ed.), pages 165-210, Reidel, Dordrecht 1978. Originally appeared in Linguistics and Philosophy 1 1-44, 1977.
Presupposition and Linguistic Context.
'Theoretical Linguistics'' 1 181–94, 1974. Also in ''Pragmatics: A Reader,'' Steven Davis (ed.), pages 406-415, Oxford University Press, 1991. Translation: Presuposición y contexto lingüistico. In ''Textos clásicos de pragmática,'' pages 175-192, María Teresea Julio and Ricardo Muños (eds.), Arco Libros, Madrid 1998.
The Logic of English Predicate Complement Constructions.
Publications of the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington 1971. Translations: Die Logik englischer Prädikatkomplement-konstruktionen. in ''Generative Semantik'', 243–78, W. Abraham and R. Binnick (eds.), Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1973; La logique des constructions anglaises à complément prédicatif. ''Langages'' 8 56–80, 1973.
Conventional Implicature.
(with Stanley Peters) In ''Syntax and Semantics 11, Presupposition'', pages 1–56, C.-K. Oh and D. A. Dinneen (eds.), Academic Press, New York 1979.
''Texas Linguistic Forum'', Vol. 22. 1983
A special issue on Two-level morphology introducing the system.
Finite-state Constraints
In the ''Proceedings of the International Conference on Current Issues in Computational Linguistics'', June 10–14, 1991. Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia. Also in ''The Last Phonological Rule''. J. Goldsmith (ed.), pages 173–194, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Computing with Realizational Morphology
In ''Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing'', Alexander Gelbukh (ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2588, pages 205–216, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg. 2003.
The Insufficiency of Paper-and-Pencil Linguistics: the Case of Finnish Prosody
In ''Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan'', Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple, and Tracy Holloway King (eds.), pages 287–300, CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, 2006.

References

External links

Lauri Karttunen's Home Page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Karttunen, Lauri Living people 1941 births Linguists from Finland Linguists from the United States Semanticists Computational linguistics researchers Finnish expatriates in the United States Scientists at PARC (company) Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics