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    Accommodation is not a viable interpretation strategy for... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    Accommodation is not a viable interpretation strategy for pronouns because pronouns have insufficient descriptive content to anchor a new discourse referent.

    Philosophy of Language
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    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Accommodation requires enough descriptive content to identify what is being referred to.
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    • 2.Pronouns (e.g., 'she') have relatively poor descriptive content.
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    • 3.Without sufficient descriptive content, being told 'she is wonderful' is not helpful if the referent is unclear.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Lewis's notion of accommodation shows that context supplies missing presuppositions dynamically, not that content must pre-exist the utterance.
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    • 2.Pronouns trigger accommodation by exploiting salience and world knowledge, not by carrying internal descriptive content themselves.
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    • 3.Successful pronoun accommodation in narrative discourse (e.g., 'A man walked in. He sat down.') demonstrates referent anchoring without rich description.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Discourse Representation Theory itself shows that indefinites introduce discourse referents with minimal content, yet accommodation via bridging is uncontroversial for them.
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    • 2.If minimal descriptive content blocks accommodation for pronouns, the same objection would undermine accommodation for bare indefinites, which the literature widely accepts.
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    Related

    Accommodation requires enough descriptive content to identify what is being refe...Discourse Representation Theory itself shows that indefinites introduce discours...If minimal descriptive content blocks accommodation for pronouns, the same objec...Lewis's notion of accommodation shows that context supplies missing presuppositi...
    +4 moreShow less
    Pronouns (e.g., 'she') have relatively poor descriptive content.Pronouns trigger accommodation by exploiting salience and world knowledge, not b...Successful pronoun accommodation in narrative discourse (e.g., 'A man walked in....Without sufficient descriptive content, being told 'she is wonderful' is not hel...

    Similar

    Because accommodation is unavailable to pronouns, binding is the only ...79%Ambiguity plays a more central and widespread role in sentence, uttera...77%Utterance ambiguity arising from speaker reference intentions should n...77%Propositions are not the right sort of entity to serve as the semantic...76%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: discourse-representation-theory
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    The binding theory incorporates the notion of accommodation as follows. Presuppositions, according to the theory, introduce information that prefers to be linked to discourse referents that are already available in the DRS, and in this respect they are like pronouns. However, if a suitable discourse referent is not available, a new one will be accommodated, and the presupposition is linked to that. Generally speaking, accommodation is not an option in the interpretation of pronouns, and a possi
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit