Approaches to implicature: Rational choice and/or exhaustification

LoLa Workshop 09/08 10/08 11/08 12/08 13/08

Workshop Chairs:
Judith Degen (Stanford)
Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod)
Daniel Lassiter (Stanford)

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/approachestoimplicature/home

We propose to organize a workshop which will bring together researchers interested in two prominent threads of work on implicature in natural language. The first is the rational choice approach associated with game-theoretic pragmatics and its close relative, the Bayesian Rational Speech Acts model. The second is the exhaustification-based approach. While these approaches have generally been thought to be in theoretical tension, there are also underexplored ways to combine them, with the potential to benefit both approaches. We will encourage researchers to compare the theoretical resources and empirical predictions of the two approaches separately and also when combined, with the hope of producing a more unified theory of implicature and a more general understanding of the data that such a theory must account for.