Karttunen received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s he worked mostly on semantics. He published a series of seminal papers on discourse referents, presuppositions, implicative verbs, conventional implicatures, and questions. In the 1980s Karttunen became, along with Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, and Kimmo Koskenniemi, 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 and have been licensed by Xerox to many companies including SAP and Microsoft. Karttunen retired from PARC in 2011. He is currently working on at CSLI.
Honors
The Association for Computational Linguistics 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 a . 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 European awarded Karttunen's XFST application a at the in Brussels "for software products and services that actively contribute to the European Multilingual Information Society."
Selected Articles
In Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Vol. III, pages 20-39. Routledge, 2003. Also in Syntax and Semantics 7: Notes from the Linguistic Underground, 363-85, J. D. McCawley, Academic Press, New York 1976. The first published version of the paper appeared in the .
In Formal Semantics. The Essential Readings.Paul Portner and Barbara H. Partee, pages 382-420. Blackwell, 2003. Also in Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Vol. V, pages 207-249. Routledge, 2003 and in Questions, H. Hiz, pages 165-210, Reidel, Dordrecht 1978. Originally appeared in Linguistics and Philosophy 1 1-44, 1977.
Theoretical Linguistics 1 181-94, 1974. Also in Pragmatics: A Reader, Steven Davis, 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, Arco Libros, Madrid 1998.
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, Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1973; La logique des constructions anglaises à complément prédicatif. Langages 8 56-80, 1973.
In Syntax and Semantics 11, Presupposition, pages 1-56, C.-K. Oh and D. A. Dinneen, Academic Press, New York 1979.
A special issue on Two-level morphology introducing the system.
In Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple, and Tracy Holloway King, pages 287-300, CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, 2006.
