Predicting Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Games

摘要

One of the most astonishing features of human language is its ability to convey information efficiently in context. Each utterance need not carry every detail; instead, listeners can infer speakers' intended meanings by assuming utterances convey only relevant information. These communicative inferences rely on the shared assumption that speakers are informative, but not more so than is necessary given the communicators' common knowledge and the task at hand. Many theories provide high-level accounts of these kinds of inferences (1-3), yet, perhaps because of the difficulty of formalizing notions like "in-formativeness" or "common knowledge," there have been few successes in making quantitative predictions about pragmatic inference in context.