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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Accommodation is not a viable interpretation strategy for pronouns because pronouns have insufficient descriptive content to anchor a new discourse referent.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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