Sub sections:
Game theory and Gricean implicatures
Semester I 2006
Dr Anton Benz
benz@sitkom.sdu.dk
(Education 108, 13 February 2006, 12.00 noon)
Abstract
One of the central topics in linguistic pragmatics is to explain why we can communicate by an utterance much more than we actually say. Grice theory of conversational implicatures is here one of the most important contributions. Grice observed that a large variety of phenomena can be explained if we take into account that communication is a joint cooperative effort which is governed by a set of rules which every rational language user has to follow. What is communicated depends not only on semantic meaning, but also on facts about the utterance situation like goals and preferences of the interlocutors. Although great progress has been made in applications of this theory, its foundations have remained somewhat vague.
In a very general sense we can say that people play a game whenever they have to decide between several actions such that the decision depends on the choice of actions by others and on their preferences over the ultimate results. If conversational implicatures are the result of the fact that communication is always a joint cooperative effort that pursues a certain purpose, then it is to be expected that implicatures can be accounted for in a game theoretic model. But only in recent years game theory has been explored as a foundational framework. In this talk I will present some examples that motivate this approach, show why it is of interest as a foundational framework, and discuss implicatures of answers where the application of game theory is especially successful.