Rationality, Cooperation and Conversational Implicature

TL;DR

This paper proposes that conversational implicatures can be better understood through rationality and planning, where speakers perform utterances as part of optimal plans for their communicative goals, aiding hearers in inference.

Contribution

It introduces a rationality-based framework for understanding conversational implicatures, replacing the elusive Principle of Cooperation with explicit planning models.

Findings

Speakers perform utterances as part of optimal plans.

Hearers infer implicatures based on rational planning assumptions.

The model provides a computationally explicit approach to implicature inference.

Abstract

Conversational implicatures are usually described as being licensed by the disobeying or flouting of a Principle of Cooperation. However, the specification of this principle has proved computationally elusive. In this paper we suggest that a more useful concept is rationality. Such a concept can be specified explicitely in planning terms and we argue that speakers perform utterances as part of the optimal plan for their particular communicative goals. Such an assumption can be used by the hearer to infer conversational implicatures implicit in the speaker's utterance.