On accommodation and its consequences
On accommodation and its consequences

Summary/Abstract: The consequence and the significance of accommodation for the normativity of presuppositions are being dealt with, the conclusions being that accommodation arises at the semantics/ pragmatics interface; accommodation leaves unaffected the normative potential of a sentence’s presupposition; any discussion of accommodation should carefully distinguish between the semantic and pragmatic presuppositions of a sentence; the set of semantic presuppositions associated with the sentence are determined by the semantic component while the set of pragmatic presuppositions, whose normative role is obvious, may be viewed as a set of constraints imposed by the sentence on the context; the context may satisfy the presuppositions of a sentence either because they are already part of common ground or because they can be accommodated; there are semantic and pragmatic constraints on what can be accommodated, and the one requirement which cannot be circumvented is that only pragmatic presuppositions which do not conflict with the common ground can be accommodated.

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