A story of Jerry and Bob

In this paper Rogers examines two proposed accounts of pragmatic presupposition, offered by Stalnaker and Sadock at the 1973 Texas Conference, in light of what we now call presupposition accommodation. Rogers argues that the general process of utterance incrementation, pointed out by Stalnaker (1978), and developed in Rogers’s paper, reveals that the process of accommodation is more complex than envisioned in Stalnaker’s work, that Stalnaker’s account and Sadock’s apply at different points in the accommodation process, and that given a version of Stalnaker’s evolving account, extended in light of utterance incrementation, Sadock’s proposal appears to follow as a condition on utterance per se.