ABSTRACT

A basic discovery of research in semantics, pragmatics and their interface is that the meaning of an utterance is not always a single, unified whole, but can be divided into different components of meaning. The chapter addresses one such division: the division between presupposed and asserted content. Evidence for accommodation as well as for the division between presupposed and asserted content comes both from the discourse properties of complete utterances, and their compositional interpretation of complex utterances. The chapter introduces data from the discourse level. It discusses the evidence from complex utterances, and at the same time introduce the framework of Dynamic Semantics which arguably represents the most influential account of these data. The chapter also discusses some important challenges to the Dynamic Semantics framework. As these later developments show, the research on presuppositions and accommodation remains one of the most debated topics in the semantics/pragmatics literature.