Many scholars in semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence and philosophy of language have focused during the past decade on contextual effects in interpretation. Presupposition accommodation is at the intersection of central issues in this area. When an utterance presupposes information which the addressee does not already have (I'm on my way to my daughter's graduation" presupposes the speaker has a daughter), the addressee may sometimes cooperatively accommodate that information, behaving as though he already knew it to be true, and go on to respond appropriately to the assertion ("Congratulations!"). This project comprises a week-long intensive interdisciplinary course for students, followed by a three-day workshop on presupposition accommodation, bringing together scholars from across the five fields. An interactive website will subsequently provide an ongoing virtual roundtable for continued interdisciplinary engagement with the questions at issue. The main goals are to foster the development of a new stage of the literature on presupposition and context-dependence, informed by application as well as theory, and to enliven the interdisciplinary discussion through the intensive course and the on-going website.
Presupposition accommodation has broad implications for the theory of linguistic interpretation across the five fields involved in the project, because it involves many of the same processes and constraints as in the recognition of contextual effects generally. In addition to its ramifications for theories of meaning in linguistics and for philosophical discussions of the nature of meaning, presupposition accommodation bears on psycholinguistic theories of human linguistic competence, illustrating the interaction between linguistic and non-linguistic (general cognitive) processes. An appreciation of how it functions is important for the creation of software that aims to systematically interpret or produce language in context. Significant new advances in our understanding of these issues are more likely to be made through interdisciplinary collaboration.
