Relevance in Cooperation and Conflict

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.

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