Game Theoretical Account Of Conversational Implicature In Debate

Game Theory is one of the most famous and significant economical theory. As a means of analyzing and solving conflicts and cooperation, it is applied to decision-making so as to maximize the payoffs for the players based on the given information. It attracted attention from western linguists and has became a new framework of language study. Based on the framework of Game Theory, the present thesis studies the generation and calculation of conversational implicature in debate, and tries to explain why debaters adopt certain strategies instead of other strategies.This thesis aims to answer two questions:the feasibility of Game Theory in analyzing conversational implicature and how it can be applied into implicature calculation. It is argued that conversation in nature is an economic behavior and game theory is applicable in the study of conversational implicatures calculation. The debaters in a turn of debate can be regarded as rational players in a game. They have both conflicts and cooperation because they are rational players who want to maximize their payoffs. In order to achieve an efficient and effective communication, they have to take some strategic actions to "play", i.e. debating strategies. It is found that when debaters face favorable situations, they tend to adopt "risky" debating strategies with high payoff and risk which belong to violations of quality maxim and manner maxim, for example, metaphor, irony, hyperbole and rhetorical question? while in unfavorable situations, debaters are inclined to choose "conservative" debating strategies with low payoff and risk which are categorized into violations of quantity maxim and relation maxim, for example, giving the slip, giving irrelevant answer, striking at the root and turning to previous topic or initiating a new topic. A Game Theoretical account gives us a more objective and vivid understanding of debating strategy:why debaters adopt debating strategies, why debaters adopt certain strategies, and how to work out the conversational implicature that generated by using debating strategies.