Accommodation and Implicature

* * * * * * * By J. L. Speranza
* * * * * * * * * * * for the Grice Club.

* * * * * I WOULD LIKE to share with the Club some quotes on the verb, 'accommodate'. I did hear it first in a Gricean context from my favourite cybernaut, R. Thomason, and the technical use vis a vis "implicature", but the thing can be used, as it should, more broadly, and, perhaps, as a thesauric variant of 'adapt'. Thus we read in J. M. Baldwin, Mental Development (1895: 217) (by courtesy of the OED):

Accommodation as it is best
to call it in psychology,
adaptation in biology.

So you see what a little change of a little word (or two) can do: marvels. Consider this later quote, from R. M. Maciver's Society (1937:106) (again courtesy of the OED):

To his complex changeful world
man can achieve only a partial
adjustment, a compound of conflict
and accommodation
(by the latter term we mean the
process in which the person
or the group comes to fit
into a given situation and to
feel ‘at home’ within it)

Home is where the heart is, as it were. Not really too different from 'adapt' but perhaps more 'polite'. As Kai von Fintel wonderfully quotes online, in his excelent study, from Beaver and Zeevat's study on accommodation:

The prominence of _desire_ makes
it a favourite term in the
tourism industry.

Now, for Thomason. Richmond Thomason -- who shared with Grice the famous stage at Performadillo, back in Texas in 1973, and where Thomason presented some of his key ideas that he would later develop in further studies -- applied the idea of 'accommodation' to the 'pirotic' stage of Gricean communicators.

So it is a bit of a more technical term, with Thomason. Grice apparently denies -- or has gone on record as denying -- see his reply to the editors of his festschrift PGRICE -- that what he calls 'language-destitute' creatures can "m-intend" (where 'm' is a sort of circular way to refer to his views on 'meaning'). But surely most Griceians abide by some appeal to a 'gradual series' of an Aristotelian nature.

The ultimate stage in this pirotic evolution is full-blown communication between talking pirots, as it were.

How is this communication achieved?

At the pragmatic level, through co-operation (and minimisation of conflict). Thus it is assumed that the intersection between the desires of A and the desires of B (in a context where they are mutually interested in the exchange of information about what they mean) should NOT be null. 'Conversation' is _not_ a zero-sum game, but a plus-sum one. It is this scenario that inspires Thomason, indeed following David Kellogg Lewis -- another good ol' Gricean -- vide his (1979) -- and cfr. Heilm (1982), Thomason (1987), Hobbs (1987)) to popularise the term 'accommodate'.

"To accommodate". What does the word suggest? Well, it's Latin alright. From cum, 'with', and modus, mode, measure. As Kai von Fintel, again in that wonderful study online, notes as he quotes from Beaver and Zeevat in their study on accomodaton, in

the everyday use of 'accommodate',
the 'direct object' is the person
for whom we are making ADAPTATIONS,
not the adaptations themselves

But Thomason, and this is a minor change of usage, of course, would speak, briefly, of 'accommodate' as taking as its direct object information itself. Accommodation is thus defined as the adaptation made to enhance communicational success.

It is interesting that while 'accommodation' was brought to the forum by philosophers of language dealing with special cases of communication (such as
'implicature') it may have a broader application then as a description of those stages of 'pirotological' development _where_ communication takes place simpliciter. Thomason is aware of this, and his work on the area magisterially combines the best of Grice's work on both areas then: not just "Implying" but its genus: Meaning.

(My gratitude to Kai von Fintel for thoughts on this).

Refs.:

Beaver, David and Henk Zeevat (2007). 'Accommodation', in G. Ramchand and C. Reiss. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, pp. 533–538.