What is Presupposition Accommodation, Again?

By Kai von Fintel. 2008

318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Presupposition accommodation is the process by which the context is adjusted quietly and without fuss to accept the utterance of a sentence that puts certain requirements on the context in which it is processed. In this paper, I explore some questions about accommodation that are still often asked. There are complaints that the putative process involves mysterious magic and that it is posited only to save a superfluous or wrong theory of presupposition. I hope to do my part in clarifying what presupposition accommodation is. As will become obvious, the paper is a kind of opinionated survey of questions about presupposition accommodation together with my favored answers. In each case, there is much more thought and research that should be done – and more likely than not, much thought and research has been done that I have not adequately digested. What follows is thus a temporary status report about where I am.1

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70ffcf17f0b29e72caf32f03b286215889948128

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Citations in the corpus

An Experimental Comparison Between Presuppositions and Indirect Scalar Implicatures (2015, background): “11 In this perspective, the presupposition is said to be ‘accommodated’ in the context (Lewis, 1979); see von Fintel 2008; Beaver and Zeevat 2012 and references therein for further discussion. b.”
Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content (2013, background): “…we assume is a context in which an utterance can be produced, not an abstract, theoretical construct that is postulated as the context in which an utterance is processed and that may have been enriched with information not present in the utterance context (e.g. Stalnaker 2008, von Fintel 2008).”
Presupposition projection from quantificational sentences: trivalence, local accommodation, and presupposition strengthening (2013, background): “Still the question is real and needs to be addressed (see, von Fintel 2000b, 2008).”
Maximize Presupposition! and local contexts (2011, background): “19See Beaver [3, 4], von Fintel [ 8 ], Heim [19], P erez Carballo [29], van Rooij [30], Singh [39, 41].”
Maximize Presupposition and Gricean reasoning (2012, background): “(von Fintel 2008) The same conclusion can be reached on the basis of self-referential statements.”