Paul Grice has given an account of conversational implicatures that hinges on the hypothesis that communication is a cooperative activity performed by rational agents which pursue a common goal. The attempt to derive Grice’s principles from game theory is a natural step, since its aim is to predict the behaviour of rational agents in situations where the outcome of one agent’s choice depends also on the choices of others. Generalised conversational implicatures, and in particular scalar ones, offer an ideal test (...) bed for this working hypothesis, since with this kind of implicatures the alternative choices available to the agents are less dependent on context, and they can be derived from the meanings of the sentences employed. Some rival game-theoretic accounts of the same phenomena will be criticised. The present paper shows that scalar implicatures can be explained using iterated admissibility, but that some of these need an additional assumption in order to be accounted for. (shrink)

Game theoretic pragmatics is a small but growing part of formal pragmatics, the linguistic subfield studying language use. The general logic of a game theoretic explanation of a pragmatic phenomenon is this: the conversational context is modelled as a game between speaker and hearer; an adequate solution concept then selects the to‐be‐explained behavior in the game model. For such an explanation to be convincing, both components, game model and solution concept, should be formulated and scrutinized as explicitly as possible. The (...) article demonstrates this by a concise overview of both evolutionary and non‐evolutionary approaches to game theoretic pragmatics, arguing for the use of agent‐based micro‐dynamics within evolutionary, and for the use of epistemic game theory within non‐evolutionary approaches. (shrink)

Indefinites face competition at two levels: Presupposition and content. The antipresupposition hypothesis predicts that they signal the opposite of familiarity, or uniqueness, namely, novelty, or non-uniqueness. At the level of descriptive content, they are pressured from two sides: definites expressing identity and another phrases expressing difference, and Gricean reasoning predicts that indefinites signal both difference and identity and are infelicitous when definites and another phrases are felicitous. However, occasionally a space opens between the and another, for a to fill. This (...) is in part due to conditions handicapping the or another semantically, in part to another’s phonological handicap. The division of labor between determiners in the field of difference and sameness is thus the result of an intricate competition. We model this competition in a version of game-theoretic pragmatics. (shrink)