After a couple of weeks’ break, we’re back with a talk from Hannah Rohde, our new pragmatics lecturer.

***NOTE UNUSUAL VENUE!***

Nov 22nd, 11:00-12:30, 8.16 David Hume Tower

Conventionalizing ambiguity: Testing predictions of a game-theoretic model of pragmatic inference

Hannah Rohde (joint work with Brady Clark, Gerhard Jaeger, Stefan Kaufmann, & Scott Seyfarth)

Abstract:
In order to understand the emergence of the conventional use of ambiguous forms, we consider predictions from a game-theoretic model of reference production and interpretation. The application of game theory to linguistic phenomena points to the importance of interlocutors’ shared knowledge regarding production costs and the inferencing rules that govern a communication game. The questions we ask are what discourse contexts and what production costs induce speakers to start using (and listeners to start understanding) words whose meaning would otherwise be ambiguous.

In two studies involving real-time two-player communication games, we show that players conventionalize the meaning of otherwise ambiguous words crucially when the cost of uniquely identifying a referent is too high. The rate at which players experiment with and eventually conventionalize the use of ambiguous forms also differs depending on the cost differences among available unambiguous forms. The emerging pattern resembles the well-known conventional implicature in English whereby the less costly expression “some” is taken to mean “some but not all”, but the results suggest that this type of phenomenon need not depend on a fixed lexical host like “some” and can emerge spontaneously among speakers based on the communicative constraints of the discourse.

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »

---