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Journal of Logic and Computation Advance Access published online on November 6, 2009
Journal of Logic and Computation, doi:10.1093/logcom/exp070
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© The Author, 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Original Papers

Relevance in Cooperation and Conflict*

Michael Franke, Tikitu De Jager and Robert Van Rooij {dagger}

Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
E-mail: m.franke{at}uva.nl,s.t.dejager{at}uva.nl,r.a.m.vanrooij{at}uva.nl

Received 29 August 2008.


  Abstract

Linguistic pragmatics assumes that conversation is a by-and-large cooperative endeavour. Although clearly reasonable and helpful, this is an idealization and it pays to ask what happens to natural language interpretation if the presumption of cooperativity is dropped, be that entirely or only to some degree. Game theory suggests itself as a formal tool for modelling the different degrees in which speaker and hearer may or may not have common interests, and it is in this game-theoretic light that this article investigates in particular a notion of speaker-relevance and its impact on the question why we communicate cooperatively in most cases and what happens to pragmatic phenomena such as conversational implicatures if full cooperation cannot be assumed.

Keywords: Pragmatics; game theory; relevance; cooperation; status; implicature; credibility; iterated best response

*This article was discussed at the Michigan ‘Conversational Implicatures’ workshop in 2008.

{dagger}Author names appear in alphabetical order.


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