Optimality-Theoretic and Game-Theoretic Approaches to Implicature
Updated 2026-09-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Pragmatics studies the use and understanding of expressions in context, and its most important concept is Grice's conversational implicature of 1967: by appeal to general principles of rational cooperative behavior, an utterance conveys more than its conventional semantic meaning. Optimality-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches model this through optimization over form and information or through equilibria in signaling games.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Derive the unsaid: infer what a speaker hints at from why he did not use a shorter or stronger expression. - Weigh expressive cost: find the optimum between informativeness and formal economy to explain word choice. - Test cancellability: check whether the extra meaning can be withdrawn without contradiction.
Anchor fast decisions
Speaker and hearer have partly aligned and partly opposed interests: speakers prefer economy, hearers need information. Modeling the choice of form as optimization under constraints such as informativeness and costs such as complexity, or as strategic interaction, lets the implicatures between weak and strong forms be derived from an optimum or an equilibrium.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- plato.stanford.eduhttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature-optimality-games/verified
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