Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
AVOIDACCOMMODATION does more, it makes using assertional means to introduce
information preferred over presuppositional means as well. In this way it differs
radically from van der Sandt’s explanation in that it compares assertion with
presupposition.
How this works is best illustrated with an example. Consider the following
three sentences as the beginning of a conversation. Suppose a speaker wishes to
introduce a new female individual in the discourse. There are then at least three
expression alternatives available, a woman, the woman, and she. Each expression
alternative could update an empty input context to truth-conditionally equivalent
representations, i.e. they will all introduce a reference marker for a female
individual in the discourse representation.
(23) a. A woman came into my office today and offered me gum.
b. ??The woman came into my office today and offered me gum.
c. ??She came into my office today and offered me gum.
Why are (23)b and (23)c infelicitous as the first sentence in a discourse? The reason
given by Zeevat is that they both involve accommodation. The only expression
alternative that does not involve accommodation is a woman. The constraint
AVOIDACCOMMODATION will penalize she and the woman, as illustrated in Tableau 2,
because both require accommodation of a reference marker, therefore the
expression that should be generated will be a woman.
Tableau 2 intention: refer to a female individual, context: female individual new in
the discourse
generation: AVOID ACCOMMODATION BESTRONG
she *!
a woman
the woman *!
Van der Sandt’s explanation would be that it is the lack of descriptive content in
the pronoun and the definite NP that will make these forms difficult to
accommodate. Zeevat rejects this explanation. He argues that if lack of sufficient
descriptive content is the reason why pronouns do not accommodate, then this
suggests that they don’t contribute enough information to introduce a new
reference marker in the DRS in a coherent manner. But because a woman above
contributes the same descriptive content as her or the woman, the “amount” of
descriptive content alone cannot explain the infelicity of introducing a new female
reference marker with accommodation, something felt when reading the examples
in (23)b and (23)c. If lack of descriptive content is what makes the use of a certain
expression incomprehensible, then how can it be that the same amount of
information is sufficient for coherently communicating with assertion? There must
be something more going on that is preventing accommodation than just a
sufficient amount of descriptive content. Zeevat argues that the limitation seen in
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