Game theoretic pragmatics and implicatures in complex sentences

Anton Benz (ZAS Berlin)

In this talk I present a game theoretic model of implicatures in complex sentences. An utterance of "Some of the children got sick" will naturally be understood as meaning that some but not all the children got sick.  In this all pragmatic theories of conversational implicature agree. However, for complex sentence in which "some" is embedded under another operator, as in (A) "All of the children ate some of their broccoli", there has been considerable debate about what these sentences implicate, and about how the implicatures have to be accounted for. Two logic based approaches dominate the debate: localist approaches assume that implicatures are generated in situ, and, hence, that (A) implicates that "All of the children ate some but not all of their broccoli"; globalist approaches assume that stronger alternatives are negated globally, hence, that (A) only implicates that it is not the case that all the children ate all of their broccoli. Due to their intensive discussion, implicatures of complex sentences became a kind of benchmark for testing different frameworks of Gricean pragmatics. In this talk we first compare logic based with game theoretic approaches, more precisely, the IBR model (Franke 2009) and error models (Benz 2012). We then present error models in greater detail. Often, game theoretical pragmatics is merely seen as an attempt to provide a solid foundation for the globalist view. However, we will see that they incorporate different principles, and, depending on the choice of principles, make predictions which either coincide with localism (IBR), or deviate from both logical approaches (error models).