Accessibility and Relevance: A fork in the road

The accessibility based framework proposed by Recanati (2004) aims at explaining the output of primary pragmatic processes in entirely associative terms. This attempt has been challenged by the relevance-theoretic position that selection of meaning components is directed by considerations of relevance and not by accessibility alone. The key question concerns the extent to which an associative mechanism can account for consideration of speaker's beliefs and intentions when these affect the derivation of the propositional content of the utterance. This paper discusses two counterexamples to the accessibility based framework; both are cases of reference assignment, one modulated by speaker's abilities and the other by speaker's preferences.