Lauri Juhani Karttunen (September 29, 1941 – March 20, 2022) was an American linguist and a part-time professor in linguistics at Stanford University. He was also an ACL Fellow.

Early life and career

Karttunen was born in Finland. He studied the Finnish language at the University of Helsinki from 1960 to 1964. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. In the 1970s, he worked at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on semantics. He wrote several important papers about topics such as discourse referents, presuppositions, implicative verbs, conventional implicatures, and questions. In the 1980s, Karttunen joined Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, and Kimmo Koskenniemi as a pioneer in computational linguistics. They applied finite-state transducers to phonology and morphology. Karttunen and Kenneth R. Beesley wrote a textbook on Finite State Morphology and created tools for building morphological analyzers. Xerox licensed the finite-state technology developed by Karttunen and his colleagues at PARC and XRCE for use by companies such as SAP and Microsoft. Karttunen retired from PARC in 2011. Later, he worked on Language and Natural Reasoning at CSLI.

Honors

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) presents a "Lifetime Achievement Award" each year at its Annual Meeting. In 2007, at the 45th Meeting in Prague, Karttunen became the youngest person to receive the award at the age of 66. In 2009, the Indiana Linguistics Department honored Karttunen with a Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2011, ACL established an ACL Fellows Program. Karttunen was among seventeen individuals chosen as founding members of the ACL Fellows group for making the most significant contributions to the field. The European META-NET organization awarded Karttunen’s XFST (Xerox Finite-State Toolkit) application a META-Seal of Recognition at the 2012 Meeting in Brussels. This award recognized software products and services that support the European Multilingual Information Society.

Selected articles

• Discourse Referents. Archived 2012-10-16 at the Wayback Machine. Published in Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, edited by Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Volume III, pages 20–39, Routledge, 2003. Also included in Syntax and Semantics 7: Notes from the Linguistic Underground, pages 363–85, edited by J. D. McCawley, Academic Press, New York, 1976. The first version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of Coling'69.

• Syntax and Semantics of Questions. Archived 2012-10-16 at the Wayback Machine. Published in Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings, edited by Paul Portner and Barbara H. Partee, pages 382–420, Blackwell, 2003. Also included in Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, edited by Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Volume V, pages 207–249, Routledge, 2003, and in Questions, edited by H. Hiz, pages 165–210, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1978. The original version appeared in Linguistics and Philosophy, Volume 1, pages 1–44, 1977.

• Presupposition and Linguistic Context. Archived 2014-04-26 at the Wayback Machine. Published in Theoretical Linguistics, Volume 1, pages 181–94, 1974. Also included in Pragmatics: A Reader, edited by Steven Davis, pages 406–415, Oxford University Press, 1991. Translation: Presuposición y contexto lingüístico in Textos clásicos de pragmática, pages 175–192, edited by María Teresea Julio and Ricardo Muños, Arco Libros, Madrid, 1998.

• The Logic of English Predicate Complement Constructions. Archived 2012-10-16 at the Wayback Machine. Published in Publications of the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington, 1971. Translation: Die Logik englischer Prädikatkomplement-konstruktionen in Generative Semantik, pages 243–78, edited by W. Abraham and R. Binnick, Athenaeum, Frankfurt, 1973; La logique des constructions anglaises à complément prédicatif in Langages, Volume 8, pages 56–80, 1973.

• Conventional Implicature. Archived 2012-10-16 at the Wayback Machine. (with Stanley Peters) Published in Syntax and Semantics 11: Presupposition, edited by C.-K. Oh and D. A. Dinneen, pages 1–56, Academic Press, New York, 1979.

• Texas Linguistic Forum, Volume 22, 1983. Archived 2012-10-16 at the Wayback Machine. A special issue on Two-level morphology introducing the Kimmo system.

• Finite-state Constraints. Archived 2012-11-14 at the Wayback Machine. Published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Current Issues in Computational Linguistics, June 10–14, 1991, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia. Also included in The Last Phonological Rule, edited by J. Goldsmith, pages 173–194, University of Chicago Press, 1993.

• Computing with Realizational Morphology. Archived 2012-11-14 at the Wayback Machine. Published in Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, edited by Alexander Gelbukh, 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. Archived 2012-11-14 at the Wayback Machine. Published in Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on Themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, edited by Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple, and Tracy Holloway King, pages 287–300, CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, 2006.