Abstract

Accommodation is a process whereby the context of an utterance is adjusted or repaired in order to maintain the default assumption that the utterance constitutes an appropriate conversational move of a certain type. It involves a kind of redressive action on the part of the audience and, depending on what the appropriateness of a speech act requires, results in providing missing contextual elements such as referents for anaphoric expressions, presuppositions, suppositions, deontic facts, pragmatically enriched contents, and so on. It remains to be determined, however, what is the source of the contextual requirements whose recognition motivates and guides the accommodating context-change. The aim of this paper is to address this question - which expresses the so-called triggering or constitution problem - and suggest that it can be adequately answered by a speech act-based model, whose central idea is that the requirements in question are structural components of patterns, scripts or procedures for the performance of speech acts. The paper consists of four parts. Section 1 introduces the notion of accommodation and discusses three examples of accommodating phenomena. Section 2 develops a more elaborated description of the examples discussed in the previous section and proposes a list of questions that an adequate model of accommodation is expected to answer. Section 3 offers a critical examination of three alternative models of accommodation, i.e., David Lewis’s score-keeping model, Robert Stalnaker’s sequential update model, and Richmond Thomason’s enlightened update model; in particular, it considers how they account for the constitution of contextual requirements that trigger and guide mechanisms of context-redressive changes. Finally, Section 4, suggests basic elements of a speech actbased model; it also argues that the proposed framework can be used to explain a wide range of accommodating phenomena and can shed a new sort of light on the constitution of accommodation-triggering requirements.