Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Modals 179
means that the material in the scope of the first modal is copied into the
antecedent of the second, which makes the reference marker x accessible to
z, so that z can be bound as follows:
(9) [: O[x: thief x, break-in x],
[x, z: z = x, thief x, break-in x] D—> ~ [: take-silver z]]
Simplifying somewhat, (9) says that there is a possible world in which a thief
breaks in, and that in all possible worlds in which a thief breaks in, he takes
the silver. Thus antecedent accommodation allows us to assign adequate
truth conditions to (6), and furthermore, this can be done in a way that
accounts for the intuition that the pronoun in (6) is an ordinary anaphor. Of
course, the same account will work for the examples discussed earlier on.
Before I set out to explain what, in my opinion, is wrong with Roberts's
proposal, I want to emphasise that I agree with what I take to be her
fundamental claim, namely that modal subordination must be explained in
terms of the interaction between a modal domain and the context. What I
disagree with is her employing the notion of antecedent accommodation to
get to grips with this interaction. I shall argue later that a modal expression
presupposes its domain, and attempt to show that on this assumption modal
subordination is automatically accounted for the binding theory. Antecedent
accommodation, in contrast, is a device that is purely ad hoc, and excessively
powerful to boot.
Roberts's notion of antecedent accommodation is quite different from the
notion of accommodation as it is employed in the binding theory. Our notion
of accommodation is a comparatively weak one, because it is restricted in
two ways. First, it is always a presuppositional expression that determines
what is to be accommodated. For example, if a speaker uses a definite noun
phrase of the form 'the N', and the audience don't know of any N, then they
may agree to accept that some N exists. Thus it is always the content of the
presuppositional expression that is accommodated. 3 Furthermore, we have
seen that both the type of presuppositional expression and its content
determine whether or not it can be accommodated at all. For example, poor
presuppositions, as induced by pronouns and other semantically attenuate
definites, cannot be accommodated, generally speaking (§ 2.5).
Roberts (1989: 699) concedes that hers is an 'extension' of the original
concept of accommodation. She doesn't say exactly what she means by this,
but her use of the notion suggests that in antecedent accommodation, it is the
context that determines what material is to be accommodated. As Roberts
3
3 This is in accordance with Stalnaker's remarks on accommodation. Recall from § 1.2 that the
notion of accommodation goes back to Stalnaker (1973, 1974) and Karttunen (1973). Lewis
(1979) gave accommodation its name but at the same time widened the Stalnaker/Karttunen
concept considerably, too, as we will presently see.