Game Theoretic Account Of Conversational Implicature

Game theory is a means of cooperation or analyzing and solving conflicts. Game theory is mainly applied to making strategies to maximize the utility for the players based on the given information. The application of Game theory to pragmatics is a new joint between game theory and theoretical linguistics. This thesis, based on the game theory, studies the roles of game theory in implicature generation and interpretation and the limitations as well.The thesis starts from the construction of Game theoretical linguistics. It putsforward one of the joints joint between game theory and linguistics——game theoreticpragmatics. By using the optimization strategies of games, the thesis analyzes one of thepragmatic strategies——the strategy of conversational implicatures. In this thesis,conversational process is constructed as a game. Mathematical means are applied to the calculation, evaluation and prediction of the effects and expected utilities of the speech strategies taken by the participants so as to guide the communicators to take optimal strategies. Through the game theoretic construction and analysis of conversational implicatures, the thesis uses the general law for optimal speech and implicature interpretation and the theoretic basis of speech optimization, naturally leading to the conclusion that natural conversation has the game nature and it is feasible to conduct game-theoretic account of pragmatics. The phenomena studied range from scalar implicature generating and interpretation, quantity implicature to anaphoric reference of pronouns, etc..At last, the thesis raises the defects of the study. It points out the general problems of mathematical analysis of social scientific programs—overgeneralizing, misleading and mechanical. At first, game theory overgeneralizes natural conversation, neglecting the influences of social and cultural factors on implicatures. Game theoretic account of pragmatics takes the simple model—single turn as its research unit, which is only an ideal form of conversation.