The purpose of this bibliography is to provide an overview of the work on presupposition accommodation, including both some historical background on the key concepts in the field and a review of the central papers that have shaped the discussion. Given the size of the literature on this topic (especially on presupposition), this bibliography can only provide a partial overview, which necessarily reflects a particular perspective.
The bibliography is organized as follows.
Lewis, David. 1969. Convention. A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
In his ground-breaking book, Lewis analyzes the use of language as a “coordination problem.” His analysis is to a great extent inspired by the theory of games of pure coordination, as proposed by Thomas Schelling (The Strategy of Conflict, 1960). Lewis defines coordination problems as “situations of interdependent decision by two or more agents in which coincidence of interest predominates and in which there are two or more proper coordination equilibria” (p. 24). When rational agents are confronted by a coordination problem, they rely on a system of concordant mutual expectations by which they replicate each other's thoughts (i.e. they are able to predict each others' moves). Mutual expectations may be based upon verbal explicit agreement (which creates strong expectations) or “salience” of a solution. A special case of the latter is “precedent”; a solution that proved successful in the past for an analogous coordination problem is likely to be successful again. This is the case because a sense of common interest induces the members of a community to conform to (and prefer) regularities that have developed and govern the achievement of coordination problems. Therefore, convention is defined as:
A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if it is true that, and it is common knowledge in P that, in any instance of S among members of P,
(1) everyone conforms to R;
(2) everyone expects everyone else to conform to R;
(3) everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that the others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a coordination equilibrium in S. (p. 58)
According to Lewis's perspective, being a cooperative interlocutor (although he doesn't use this expression) in a dialogue means to “conform to the conventions” of language. Although a convention places a constraint on behavior, it does not determine it. In fact, the convention is chosen because it is preferred; it allows the agent to accomplish his purpose and corresponds to a common sense of interest. A useful example is the Convention of Truthfulness (which corresponds roughly to Grice's first Maxim of Quality), by which members of a population P try to be truthful when uttering sentences of a language L. Not only do communicators want to be truthful because their audience has been led to expect such behavior, but also because the convention is sustained by a sort of interest: “an interest in communication, in being able to control one another's beliefs and actions, to some extent, by means of sound and marks”. (p. 181) Lewis ultimately argues that for L to be “an actual language of P” a convention of truthfulness must prevail in L, because it agrees with ordinary language as we know it.
Although this seems to be the narrow sense in which Lewis understands the Convention of Truthfulness, he seems to assume “a more general convention of truthfulness”. Lewis's examples (cf. pp. 192-194) crucially resemble the examples in Grice (1975), and this general principle seems to correspond to the Cooperative Principle. This broader notion of truthfulness pertains to the ways by which people resolve ambiguity in conversational practice. For Lewis, being a cooperative interlocutor involves recognizing “each other's conversational purposes” (p. 193) and ruling out possible interpretations of an utterance accordingly. This disposition to adjust one's behavior in the course of a conversation to the joint communicative goals clearly feeds into his later notion of accommodation.
An analogy provided by Lewis himself (based on Hume) may be illuminating. In conforming to the conventions of language an interlocutor is being cooperative just as two rowers who manage to fall into and maintain a smooth rhythm in a boat are coordinating their behavior. Their choice of a move (in this case, their rowing in that particular rhythm) is constrained by the regularity they observe and expect in the other rower's behavior (i.e. they conform to the convention) and they do so in view of their individual interest in achieving a common purpose.
Lewis, David. 1979. Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8: 339-359.
This paper coins the term "accommodation", although the notion is already present in Stalnaker (1974), Karttunen (1974), and Grice (1981). As Lewis points out, "it's not as easy as you might think to say something that will be unacceptable for lack of required presuppositions. Say something that requires a missing presupposition, and straightway that presupposition springs into existence, making what you said acceptable after all." (Lewis 1979: 339) This rule of “accommodation for presupposition” seems to be a facet of a much wider phenomenon assuring that participants in a conversation can - within certain limits - adjust and/or supply the information that is necessary in the course of a conversation to allow for a “correct play” of the language game. Correctness of the move is crucially related to the current stage of the game.
Lewis uses the metaphor of the "scoreboard" in a baseball game to talk about the update of information in a conversation. The scoreboard in a game makes it possible to keep track of each move of the players and provides a record of the information defining any given stage in a game. However, whereas in a baseball game the score can only be changed by the actual events, in the "conversational score" accommodation plays a role, as the components of the score can be changed if that is required to assure that the conversational move is acceptable. This rule-governed type of behavior results from the cooperative efforts from the participants in a conversation. The general “rule of accommodation for presupposition” is formulated as follows:
If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then - ceteris paribus and within certain limits - presupposition P comes into existence at t. (p. 340)
Several components of the score are subject to the rules of accommodation, e.g. the ranking of comparative salience of entities in the domain of discourse, standards of precision, accessibility relations for modal verbs. A point already made in this paper is that however powerful the mechanism of accommodation may be, there are limits as to what can be accommodated. This remains one of the more complex and unsolved issues pertaining accommodation.
Grice, H. P. 1989 [1975]. Logic and conversation. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 22-40.
Although this paper is not traditionally associated with the literature on presupposition accommodation, it is certainly foundational for a broader view of accommodation which is shared by several scholars nowadays.
Grice's basic assumption is that talk exchanges are characteristically “cooperative efforts” of rational agents. These are expected to observe the (now famous) Cooperative Principle:
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. (p. 26)
According to this view, each participant must not only recognize a “purpose or set of purposes” of the exchange, and use that knowledge to calculate the intended interpretation of each utterance, but also must do so at each particular stage of the exchange. Although this point is not the object of further development by Grice in the paper, it hints at an important dimension of discourse, namely its informational structure, and at the fact that participants in a talk exchange keep track of the “moves” of the other participants.
The metaphor of `conversation as game' is pervasive in the paper. Being a cooperative speaker or hearer means not to give up “the assumption that the conversational game is still being played” (p. 35). In other words, verbal communication as we know it relies on the assumption that the participants in a talk exchange are rational individuals whose verbal behavior is consistent with their intentions. Crucially, both the observance and the flouting of the rules lead to the assumption that the game is being played. From a theoretical perspective, this guarantees the predictive power of this approach (using the machinery of the general principle and the specific maxims and sub-maxims).
As in Lewis (1969), a special role is assigned to the truthfulness of the contributions: “other maxims come into operation only on the assumption that this maxim of Quality is satisfied.” (p. 27). Looking at the non-conversational analogues of the conversational maxims provided in the paper, one of the examples seems to suggest that what is meant is not so much a notion of “truth”, but rather of “adequacy” or disposition to coordinate one's behavior with the overall goals of the conversation. So, in the context of baking a cake, “[I]f I need a spoon, I do not expect a trick spoon made of rubber” (p. 28).
This section presents some of the classic papers that shaped our view of presupposition and the relevant distinctions thereof (semantic vs pragmatic presuppositions, informative presuppositions). The last papers in this section discuss and question some of these basic distinctions.
The section also includes several papers that treat presupposition within theories of dynamic semantics and those that conceive of “presupposition projection as anaphora resolution”. The related issues of when and where presupposed information is accommodated arise in several of these papers.
Stalnaker, Robert. 1974. Pragmatic Presuppositions. In Milton Munitz and Peter Unger (eds.), Semantics and Philosophy, 197-214, New York: New York University Press.
In this paper, Stalnaker argues for a pragmatic analysis of the phenomenon of presupposition. In the discussion of the advantages of such an account over a semantic one, he introduces the notion of “speaker presupposition”.
Although he never uses the term “accommodation”, he points out that in many cases speakers act as if certain propositions were part of the common ground, although they know that they aren't. In such cases, the propositions are conveyed indirectly (along the lines of what Grice calls “exploitation of a maxim”) because the hearers are able to infer that a certain proposition is being presupposed: “In such a case, a speaker tells his auditor something in part by pretending that the auditor already knows it.” (p. 202)
As Stalnaker notes, this is not an attempt at deception or uncooperative behavior, because of an important theoretical distinction. A speaker is making a presupposition even when he is only pretending to have the beliefs that one normally has when one makes presuppositions: «Presupposing is thus not a mental attitude like believing, but is rather a linguistic disposition - a disposition to behave in one's use of language as if one had certain beliefs, or were making certain assumptions.» (p. 202)
Stalnaker, Robert. 1998. On the representation of context. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 7, 3-19.
This is a paper on the dynamics of context with significant consequences for the theory of accommodation. Stalnaker's main claim (for the purpose of this bibliography) is that “The prior context that is relevant to the interpretation of a speech act is the context as it is changed by the fact that the speech act was made, but prior to the acceptance or rejection of the speech act.” (p. 8) This notion of context is crucial to the “common ground theory of presupposition” and provides the basis for an account of informative presupposition (cf. von Fintel 2000).
Since contextual assumptions are constantly updated by any event happening at the scene of a conversation (which obviously includes any speech act), it becomes unnecessary to postulate a special "rule of accommodation". Instead of saying (à la Lewis) that the presupposition "came into existence", Stalnaker proposes that the presupposition is present in the context by virtue of the fact that the speech act occurred. In an example like (1)
the speaker is presupposing that she has a cat, therefore this information becomes available to the hearer by the time he will perform the update on the context set. It doesn't matter that the hearer did not entertain this assumption before hearing the sentence; it follows from the fact that the sentence was uttered that it became shared information.
Karttunen, Lauri. 1974. Presuppositions and Linguistic Context. Theoretical Linguistics 1, 181-194.
This paper presents a very influential version of a satisfaction theory of presupposition. Karttunen argues that “a sentence is always taken to be an increment to a context that satisfies its presuppositions.” (p. 191) Although no specific term is proposed for this phenomenon, Karttunen points out that when the presuppositions of a sentence are not satisfied in the conversational context, the hearer is expected to make a “tacit extension” of the context in order to satisfy the presuppositions. A cooperative hearer accepts this indirect way of conveying information by figuring out the missing information.
Gauker, Christopher.2003. Words without meaning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
In this book, Gauker argues against the pragmatic view of presupposition (what von Fintel calls “the common-ground” view of presupposition) and the idea that presupposition accommodation is a particular instance of a coordination problem (in the sense of Lewis 1969) that involves reflexive reasoning. In particular, he claims that the phenomenon of informative presupposition cannot be dealt with within such a view, and that accommodation does not provide a solution, since it cannot be used as a condition which may or may not be satisfied.
Heim, Irene. 1982. On the Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Heim discusses accommodation with respect to novel definites. According to the Novelty-Familiarity-Condition, a definite can never introduce a new discourse referent. However, there are uses of definite descriptions that don't obey this condition and yet are perfectly felicitous. She presents the following:
These utterances can be rendered felicitous by accommodation, which is defined as «an adjustment of the file that is triggered by a violation of a felicity condition and consists of adding to the file enough information to remedy the infelicity» (p. 372).
Importantly, what is “enough” information in such cases requires further analysis. For example, in (3) the hearer will probably infer that “the author” is not only the author of a book but the author of the book just mentioned. Heim formulates a general rule to this fact: «When a new file card is introduced under accommodation, it has to be linked by crossreferences to some already-present file card(s). (Hence the term “bridging”: the crossreferences form a “bridge” that connects the new discourse referent to the network of discourse referents that is already established.)» (p. 373). While in the case of associative anaphor the added card is linked to another (previously existing) card, in (1) and (2) it is linked to the utterance situation.
Heim, Irene. 1983. On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions. In Michael Barlow, Daniel Flickinger and Michael Westcoat (eds.), Second Annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pp. 114-126, Stanford University.
In this paper Heim analyzes presupposition projection within the broader issue of the principles that govern context change. She discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Karttunen and Peters's (K&P) and Gazdar's theories of presupposition projection. Her goal is to address Gazdar's criticism of K&P's treatment of the three components of meaning (“content property”, “presupposition property”, and “heritage property”) as being independent from each other. Heim proposes the reduction of the content and heritage property to just one semantic property, the CCP (“context change potential”).
For the cases where the “admittance condition” is not met, Heim proposes (following Lewis 1979) that the context is amended by accommodation. In a dynamic semantics, there may be several places where accommodation takes place. She defines two types of accommodation, global (A) and local (B): A consists of enriching the broader context, i.e. the information obtained from the interpretation of a sequence of sentences, while B consists of adjusting the context (in this case, sub-parts of a sentence) only for the immediate or local purpose of admitting the constituent sentences as we calculate the context update. Heim claims that global accommodation is generally preferred.
Soames, Scott. 1982. How presuppositions are inherited: a solution to the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 13: 483-545.
The point of interest for this bibliography is the discussion of the use of utterance presuppositions to introduce new information in a conversation. This choice may be grounded either on “economy” reasons (brevity of expression) or on special conversational purposes (cf. Stalnaker's notion of “pretense”).
In choosing to convey new information by means of a presupposed assumption rather than by an explicit assertion, the speaker indicates that he regards (and expects the interlocutor to regard) the proposition as being taken for granted or not subject to questioning: «the status of the information as a presupposition indicates that the speaker expects, or wishes, it to be regarded as uncontroversial.» (p. 486) Therefore, Soames claims that the following two features of utterance presuppositions must be taken into account: «(i) The ability to use them to increment a context by adding new information. (ii) The special, privileged status accorded this information.» (p. 487)
van der Sandt, Rob . 1992. Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. Journal of Semantics 9: 333-377.
Since the 1980's, the development of dynamic theories of natural language semantics provided a new background for theories of presupposition. Van der Sandt's work builds on the similarities between the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns and presuppositional phenomena, and provides an integrated account of both within Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). On his view, presupposition triggers are anaphoric at the level of DRSs. Therefore, presupposition projection can be treated as anaphora resolution, involving both semantic and pragmatic factors. When accommodation takes place, reference markers and conditions get added to different sites along the accessibility paths provided by the discourse structure. Accommodation is governed by the general constraints on binding and acceptability provided by the representational framework of DRT.
Previous work which is related to his (1992) paper includes:
Zeevat, Henk. 1992. Presupposition and Accommodation in Update Semantics. Journal of Semantics 9 (4): 379-412.
This paper proposes a reformulation of Van der Sandt's approach to presupposition in terms of update semantics. On Zeevat's account, accommodation is performed on a stack of information states.
The author proposes a distinction between “resolution presuppositions” (triggered e.g. by definite descriptions) and “lexical presuppositions” (e.g. preconditions of actions and states). As he points out, the former have been the object of much research, given their relation with anaphors, but the latter are less known. (cf. Simons 2001)
Beaver, David. 2001. Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications and FoLLI.
This book provides an analysis of presupposition within the framework of dynamic semantics. Chapter 5 is devoted to accommodation and discusses in detail the strengths and limitations of previous approaches, in particular van der Sandt's (1992) theory and what Beaver calls his “structural notion of accommodation”. Beaver's main argument against such a perspective is that “it is not possible to predict on structural grounds alone exactly what should be accommodated. In general, the exact accommodated material can only be calculated with reference to the way in which world knowledge and plausibility criteria interact with the meaning of a given sentence.” (p. 121) Some of the problems of a structural account are exemplified with conditional presuppositions. On the second part of the book, Beaver proposes a formal account of accommodation based on preference orderings over information states, in which he incorporates the role of common sense reasoning (as understood e.g. by Hobbs) in the determination of what gets accommodated.
Beaver, David. 2004. Accommodating Topics. In Hans Kamp and Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning, p. 79-90. Amsterdam, Elsevier.
Beaver analyses presuppositional phenomena in relation to topic-focus effects. More specifically, he discusses van der Sandt's 1992 theory of presupposition and his use of intermediate, local, and global accommodation.
Simons, Mandy. 2003. Presupposition and Accommodation: Understanding the Stalnakerian Picture. Philosophical Studies 112 (3): 251-278.
This paper revisits Stalnaker's work on presupposition and in particular two different concepts of “speaker's presupposition”: (i) the “common-ground” view, according to which a presupposition is a proposition believed by the speaker to be part of the common ground in a particular conversation, and (ii) the “dispositional view”, on which a presupposition pertains to the speaker's internal state - a disposition to act as if she were assuming a certain presupposition to be true.
These different notions crucially determine the role played by accommodation in a theory of presupposition. As pointed out by Simons, Lewis's view of accommodation as repair strategy that “rescues an utterance from inappropriateness” is only compatible with the former: “[A]ny theory of presupposition which invokes a notion of accommodation to resolve discrepancies between presupposition requirements and context must assume that the context on which presuppositions impose constraints is determined by something other than the internal state of the speaker.” (p. 12-13)
On the dispositional view of presupposition, accommodation simply involves a belief change, motivated by general conversational principles (in particular, the urge to cooperate by trying to match the presuppositions of the other participants in the conversation).
Abbott, Barbara. 2000. Presuppositions as non-assertions. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (10): 1419-1437.
The author disputes the view of presupposition as background information or “shared knowledge” (i.e. the Stalnakerian notion of presupposition). According to her, this view led to an (exhaustive) identification of presupposed/asserted information with the dichotomy given/new information. However, she points out that not all new information in an utterance has to be asserted; in fact, a review of the use of e.g. definite descriptions, it-clefts, and non-restrictive relative clauses shows otherwise.
On her view, “grammatical presuppositions are a consequence of a natural limit on how much can be asserted in any given utterance, where what is asserted is what is presented as the main point of the utterance - what the speaker is going on record as contributing to the discourse.” (p. 1431) In other terms, presuppositions should be regarded as nonassertions.
Lewis's notion of accommodation, as well as the “bridging” constraints proposed in the literature, crucially relies on the above mentioned view of presupposition. However, Abbott points out that Grice's notion of “uncontroversiality”, which involves taking into consideration how expected or “worthy of being asserted” a proposition is, actually makes more accurate predictions. However, this perspective raises the question of how to determine which information gets asserted and which gets presupposed (cf. also Soames 1982).
The papers presented in this section either hint at or explicitly advocate for a broader notion of accommodation that in some cases blurs the distinction between accommodation and implicature. For the authors represented in this section, the main focus is on the mechanisms and constraints on utterance interpretation.
Grice, H. Paul. 1981. Presupposition and conversational implicature. In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, p. 183-198. New York: Academic Press.
Although the term “accommodation” never occurs in this paper, Grice's account of the triggering of some conversational implicatures hints at the kind of constraints governing the mechanism of accommodation.
In this paper, Grice claims that the existential presuppositions carried by definite descriptions can be represented within the Russellian framework and the aid of the theory of conversational implicature.
In discussing how a definite description is expanded, Grice argues that the speaker expects the hearer to recognize that some of the conjuncts have “common-ground status” and therefore are not likely to be challenged. In the following example, if two people are talking about a concert and one says
it is perfectly legitimate to utter this sentence even if the speaker knows that the hearer doesn't know that she has an aunt or that the aunt has a cousin. This is the case because the reasonable assumption to entertain «must be not that it is common knowledge but rather that it is noncontroversial, in the sense that it is something that we would expect the hearer to take from us (if he does not already know).» (p. 274)
In sum, what Grice is suggesting is that the existential presupposition (here treated as a conversational implicature) could be easily accommodated because «the hearer would be justified in concluding that two of the items must be given common-ground status» (p. 274).
Thomason, Richmond. 1990. Accommodation, meaning, and implicature: interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, & Martha Pollack, Intentions in Communication. p. 325-363. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Thomason revises Grice's account of cooperative behavior in conversation and argues that accommodation plays a major role in the generation of conversational implicatures. Accommodation, like plan recognition and cooperative goal adoption, are forms of reasoning that make it possible for human beings to mean something beyond what is explicitly said.
Following computational work on planning (particularly Allen 1983), Thomason argues that the participants in a conversation update the conversational record by reconstructing the plans of their interlocutors: in each conversational move the interpretation of an utterance must fit into a model of their purposes. If this isn't possible, the hearer will resort to accommodation. Thus the principle governing accommodation is defined as:
«Adjust the conversational record to eliminate obstacles to the detected plans of your interlocutor.» (344)
Thomason provides an example of conversational implicature induced by the recognition by the hearer of the speaker's plans (also called “domain plans”). If a man says to his wife
trying to get across `I'll need the car this afternoon', he intends her to identify the speaker's meaning by recognizing that the proposition explicitly stated corresponds to a salient obstacle to the speaker's plans. In other words: by recognizing the speaker's immediate goal in saying that he had forgotten to tell her that he would need the car, the speaker expects her to recognize also how this goal would fit in his plans (negotiating for her agreement would be the first step in a process leading to having the car this afternoon).
In this account Grice's maxims are thus replaced by a general theory of cooperative behavior «deriving from the idea that what a speaker means should fit in and cohere with the conversational plan, and with the reconstructed plans of our conversational partners.» (p. 356)
Beaver, David and Henk Zeevat. To appear. Accommodation. In Ramchand, G. and C. Reiss (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
In their introduction to accommodation, Beaver and Zeevat explicitly discuss the relation between accommodation and implicature. On their view, “[g]eneralized conversational implicatures resemble accommodation in that they involve inferences that go beyond the ordinary content of the sentence.” (p. 6). However, they differ as to “the role of context and what is taken for granted”. According to them, conversational implicatures constitute new information, i.e. information which is not assumed to be available to the hearer prior to the utterance, while accommodation involves the retrieval of information which is assumed to be available independently of the utterance. Crucially, they also argue that the mechanisms behind each type of inference differ: “[inferences that are accommodated] concern adaptation on the part of the hearer in the face of assumptions that the speaker has made, and are not obviously derivable using arguments based on Grice's maxims.” (p. 7)
Simons, Mandy. 2001. On the Conversational Basis of Some Presuppositions. In R. Hastings, B. Jackson and Z. Zvolensky, (eds.) Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 11, p. 431-448. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications
The author argues that although most current literature on presupposition focuses on presupposition projection, the problem of the sources of presupposed material has barely been addressed. In this paper, Simons argues that some presuppositions are derived on the basis of general conversational principles, the same that gives rise e.g. to conversational implicatures. On this view, some presuppositions are not generated locally (unlike presuppositions with a conventional lexical source), but rather arise as a consequence of the meaning of the utterance as a whole and the conversational situation.
Hobbs, Jerry. 2004. Abduction in Natural Language Understanding. In Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward, Handbook of Pragmatics. p. 724-741. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
This chapter provides a general introduction to abductive reasoning, its history and importance in AI. Briefly, abduction can be defined in the following way: from an observable Q and a general principle P " Q, one concludes that P must be the reason for Q; in other words, P provides an explanation for Q.
This chapter argues for the central role that abduction plays in natural language understanding and the way it accounts for a range of different phenomena, like word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution. The basic assumption is that an utterance can be treated like any other observable phenomenon for which an explanation is sought: “interpreting discourse is coming up with the best explanation for what is said” (p. 730). On this view, accommodation is a facet of a much broader cognitive mechanism and subsumes other types of inferences that involve the recognition of the speaker's intention: “We might say that implicature is a procedural characterization of something that, at the functional or interactional level, appears as accommodation. Implicature is the way we do accommodation.” (p. 730)
This section presents different attempts to tackle the pragmatic constraints governing accommodation and offers different perspectives of what these might be. The approaches presented here range from the more traditional view, which is related to presupposition satisfaction, to views that envisage constraints on accommodation within broader considerations about types of inference, information structure and the rhetoric relations in discourse.
Heim, Irene. 1992. Presupposition Projection and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs. Journal of Semantics 9: 183-221.
This paper provides an account of presupposition projection in propositional attitude sentences within the framework of context change semantics, building on Karttunen's previous observations about the presuppositions of attitude reports.
For the purpose of this bibliography, there is a point made by Heim on the nature of accommodation: “[A]ssumptions to be accommodated are supposed to be uncontroversial and unsurprising. One may explicitly assert controversial and surprising things (in fact, one should), but to expect one's audience to accept them by way of accommodation is not good conversational practice.” (p. 212) Because accommodation relies on the notion of “uncontroversiality”, it may lead to the formation of beliefs or assumptions that would hold under normal conditions.
Dryer, Matthew. 1996. Focus, pragmatic presupposition, and activated propositions. Journal of Pragmatics 26: 475-523.
This paper argues for a clarification of the notion of “given” information, in particular by drawing a distinction between “presupposed” and “activated” (in the mind of the hearer).
In section 6 of this paper, Dryer discusses the dangers of resorting to accommodation (as a methodological problem). Specifically, he points out that besides the notion of “uncontroversial proposition” not much has been said about the constraints on accommodation, although it is clear that in certain cases it is simply not possible. (See also Beaver and Zeevat's (2004) section on “Missing accommodation”).
Dryer gives two examples in which presupposed material is accommodated, both involving the presuppositions related to definite NPs, the latter involving “inferrable” discourse reference:
Watch out, the dog will bite you. (uttered to someone walking up a driveway, even if the hearer doesn't have a belief about any dog being nearby; cf. Heim 1988: 371)
We went to a restaurant but it took over half an hour before the waiter came to take our order.
Dryer argues that in such examples an account in terms of accommodation is possible because «while the hearer may not believe the proposition in question prior to the utterance, it is at least the case that the speaker does (or acts as if they do).» (p. 499). However, this explanation does not account for the difference between simple focus sentences and clefts, as the following:
A: Did anyone see John?
B: MARY saw John.
A: Did anyone see John?
B: #It was Mary that saw John.
An unconstrained theory of accommodation predicts that both (3) and (4) should be felicitous, and does not provide a reason for the fact that the presupposition associated with the cleft in (4) is not accommodated.
Moreover, Dryer suggests that although the notion of accommodation has been used with respect to (believed) presuppositions, there is evidence for the existence of a different type of accommodation. He argues for a notion of “activation accommodation” to account for cases in which the speaker acts as if certain information were activated in the hearer's mind. In this case, the hearer does not accommodate by entertaining or assuming a proposition, but rather by activating information which is already available to him.
Clark, Herbert. 1977. Bridging. In P. N. Johnson-Laird and P. C. Wason (eds.), Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 411-420.
This paper is about the inferences hearers are typically intended to draw as part of the comprehension process. These inferences present three main features: they rely upon a tacit contract between the participants in a conversation (the rules of the “conversational game”), they draw on one's general knowledge about the world, and they are constrained by a well-defined stopping rule.
According to the “Given-New Contract”, newly added information must be linked (or linkable) to information the speaker believes the hearer already knows. Identifying the intended referents of referring expressions is a problem-solving task that requires the hearer to «bridge the gap from what he knows to the intended Antecedent» (p. 413).
The kinds of bridging presented show the pervasiveness of this process, ranging from mere identity, as in (1), to indirect reference by association, as in (2) and (3):
(3) requires the hearer to draw a “backward inference”, namely that the room had chandeliers, which is “the shortest possible bridge” that allows the hearer to interpret the utterance. Note that this type of inference is an instance of abductive reasoning (cf. Hobbs 2004), since it explains the choice of the definite NP “the chandeliers”.
Such linking assumptions, which are essential for instance in anaphor resolution, constitute examples of permissible accommodation if we assume a familiarity theory of definite descriptions.
Deemter, Kees van. 1992. Towards a Generalization of Anaphora. Journal of Semantics 9 (1): 27-51.
This paper proposes a generalized notion of anaphora, which includes cases in which the relation between anaphor and antecedent involves “non-identity” or “bridging” (in the sense of Clark 1977). In particular, two kinds of anaphora are analyzed: (i) subsectional anaphora (involving the subset relation), and (ii) and relational anaphora (involving other types of relation, e.g. work/author, cause/effect). Van Deemter proposes an extended version of DRT that accounts for the resolution constraints placed by full NPs in the two cases.
Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides. 1998. Bridging. Journal of Semantics 15 (1): 83-113.
This paper provides an analysis of the phenomenon of bridging (Clark 1977) within the framework of SDRT. The authors point out that although bridging has been studied mostly with respect to definite descriptions, and therefore as a challenge for the broader phenomenon of presupposition satisfaction, such an approach is not sufficient, since bridging can occur in the absence of presupposition triggers, as exemplified in (1):
The bridging inference between the indefinite NP a rope and the proposition expressed by the previous sentence (a rope is a possible instrument to commit suicide) is essential to make this chunk of discourse coherent, and yet it cannot be explained in terms of presupposition satisfaction. The authors argue that examples like (1) show that bridging is a byproduct of discourse interpretation and crucially involves the identification of rhetorical connections between propositions. They frame their account on a formal theory of discourse representation that combines lexical and compositional semantics with a theory of rhetoric structure.
Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides. 1998. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Presupposition. Journal of Semantics 15 (3): 239-300.
This paper proposes a treatment of presupposition within the framework of SDRT. The main idea is that an adequate account of presupposed (as well as asserted) information requires a theory of discourse coherence that combines semantic and pragmatic constraints.
Their approach involves a new perspective on the mechanism of accommodation. In particular, they analyze the predictions concerning accommodation sites made by theories of dynamic semantics (in particular, Van der Sandt's 1992). They point out that accommodation is subject to pragmatic constraints which cannot be accounted for solely within a DRT-based approach: “The place where presuppositions get accommodated depends on the rhetorical links between propositions in discourse as well as their content. In particular, presuppositions are interpreted so that the rhetorical links are as strong as possible.” (p. 246) On this view, accommodation as a matter of adding missing information as required is replaced by an account of binding presuppositions to the context by using domain knowledge and rhetorical constraints.
Heim borrows the term from the psychological literature (she cites the work of Clark (1977) and Clark and Haviland (1977)).
Cf. Horn's 2002 notion of “assertorically inert”.
For example, for the sentence The king of France is bald, the expansion can be paraphrased as `There is at least one king of France, there is not more than one king of France, and nothing which is the king of France is not bald'.
Dryer provides only one example of this type of accommodation: “Chafe (1976: 34) discusses an example in which Sherlock Holmes exclaims “The BUTLER did it” to Watson, who is reading a book and whose attention is elsewhere. Chafe notes that “Holmes evidently was treating this knowledge as if…Watson were thinking of it even though he wasn't”, wording reminiscent of that of Stalnaker (1974)” (Dryer 1996: 501).