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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Definite descriptions such as 'Pedro's sister' can be accommodated when no prior discourse referent is available.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Accommodation is not a semantic operation but a pragmatic inference, so DRT's formal machinery cannot directly encode it without appeal to extra-theoretical resources.
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    • 2.Lewis (1979) showed that accommodation is governed by context-sensitive salience conditions that resist reduction to descriptive content richness alone.
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    • 3.If accommodation requires pragmatic reasoning beyond DRT's formal system, then 'Pedro's sister' succeeds not by DRT's rules but despite them.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Strawson (1950) argued that definite descriptions presuppose a uniquely identifiable referent already available to interlocutors, not one constructed mid-discourse.
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    • 2.If Strawson is correct, then 'Pedro's sister' in a context without prior discourse referent produces presupposition failure, not successful accommodation.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Accommodation becomes feasible when the referring expression provides enough descriptive content to identify a new referent.
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    • 2.Definite descriptions like 'Pedro's sister' supply richer descriptive content than pronouns.
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