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When communicating, interlocutors negotiate knowledge by proposing propositional content to be added to their shared common ground. The way in which speakers put forward propositional content -- expressing more or less confidence in its truthfulness -- may affect the way in which other interlocutors react to such content. This article examines speakers' production choices and hearers' interpretations of the formulations "believe"/"know"/bare assertion to test how (maximal) certainty is expressed and inferred, whether speakers adjust their production choices depending on their communicative goals and whether hearers are able to adjust their interpretations correspondingly. For this purpose, we created two scenarios -- one with a cooperative interlocutor and one with a potentially uncooperative interlocutor. The results suggest that "know" is epistemically the most powerful formulation -- stronger than the bare assertion -- but that the bare assertion may still be preferred over know for expressing maximal certainty in cooperative scenarios. Our findings also suggest that "believe" is used to hedge the assertive strength of statements in cooperative settings. Whereas speakers and hearers agree in the relative epistemic ordering of the formulations ("believe" < bare assertion < "know"), when inferring the speakers' degrees of belief hearers to not appear to consistently take into account that speakers' communicative goals may shift as a function of context.

We propose an extension to probabilistic pragmatic models to include a dimension that allows for the modeling of argu-mentative language use. Within our extended Rational Speech Act model, argumentative strength stands for a statisticalmeasure of observational evidence which impacts a speakers utterance choice. More concretely, our model recasts speakerutility in terms of a weight parameter which varies between being purely informative and purely argumentative. We fitthe extended RSA model to empirical data from a novel production experiment. Our initial results suggest that there isroom for argumentativity on top of informativity in formalizations of pragmatic language reasoning. Crucially, we see thatthe relationship between the two is not straightforward, as the model fails to capture instances of human behavior whichare more manipulative than expected by the suggested informativity-argumentativity trade-off. All in all, our explorationprovides us with interesting insights about this relationship.

This study investigates how quantifiers are used strategically to serve different argumentative goals. We report two experiments on how English speakers describe the results of school exams when being instructed to frame their descriptions either as a good or bad outcome. Experiment 1 shows that participants have clear preferences for specific quantifier combinations in this task. Experiment 2 shows that, in situations where producing descriptions that meet one's argumentative goals is difficult (i.e. framing very bad outcomes positively), participants tend to use quantifiers that are informationally weaker than other salient alternatives. Experiment 2 also shows that people have a bias to frame outcomes positively, even when the task asks them to frame them negatively. Put together, these results shed light on the question of how language users strategically explore different linguistic strategies to communicate quantity in pragmatically favorable ways, including how quantifiers are used vis-'a-vis other lexical expressions of quantity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language requires mindreading for entertaining communicative intentions, and mindreading in turn profits fromlanguage as a means for sharing mental states. Hence it has been hypothesised that the two skills have co-evolved.We present a Bayesian agent-based model to formalise this hypothesis. This model combines referential signalling withmental states, such that a speaker’s topic choice is probabilistically dependent on their perspective on the world. In order tolearn the language, a learner has to simultaneously infer the speaker’s lexicon and perspective. Learners can solve this task bybootstrapping one with the other, but only if the speaker uses an informative language.We will present results of an iterated learning version of this model, showing that selection on communication results inthe emergence of a fully informative lexicon from scratch. However, selection on perspective-taking alone also results in theemergence of partially-informative lexicons, which is sufficient for inferring others’ perspectives.

Word learning involves mapping observable words to unob-servable speaker intentions. The ability to infer referential in-tentions in turn has been shown to depend in part on accessto language. Thus, word learning and intention-reading co-develop. To explore this interaction, we present an agent-basedmodel in which an individual simultaneously learns a lexiconand learns about the speaker’s perspective, given a shared con-text and the speaker’s utterances, by performing Bayesian in-ference. Simulations with this model show that (i) lexicon-learning and perspective-learning are strongly interdependent:learning one is impossible without some knowledge of theother, (ii) lexicon- and perspective-learning can bootstrap eachother, resulting in successful inference of both even when thelearner starts with no knowledge of the lexicon and unhelpfulassumptions about the minds of others, and (iii) receiving ini-tial input from a ‘helpful’ speaker (who adopts the learner’sperspective on the world) paves the way for later learning fromspeakers with perspectives which diverge from the learner’s.This approach represents a first attempt to model the hypoth-esis that language and mindreading co-develop, and a first ex-ploration of the implications for theories of word learning andmindreading development.

Theoretical and empirical research on quantity implicature has concurred that pragmatically strengthened, richer readings are not available when they are not relevant to the discourse purpose. However, this claim relies on an appeal to a notion of "relevance" that has proved difficult to make precise. In this article I discuss and contrast two potential contributory factors to relevance: adherence to the Question Under Discussion, and form-based priming effects. The former can be considered to operate at a relatively high level of analysis, from the speaker's perspective, and influences the semantic content that the speaker should be attempting to convey, whereas the latter is assumed to reflect low-level psychological preferences and influences the form of words that the speaker should use. I argue that pragmatics, and specifically implicature, constitutes a useful testbed for distinguishing these effects--the availability of an implicature can be used as an indicator that a particular stronger alternative would also have been an acceptable utterance, whereas its unavailability suggests that the stronger alternative would not necessarily have been acceptable. I discuss recent experimental data from this perspective and argue that both Question Under Discussion and priming effects are customarily at play. I conclude by exploring the implications of this for our view of pragmatics and its interfaces.

Superlative quantifiers ("at least 3", "at most 3") and comparative quantifiers ("more than 2", "fewer than 4") are traditionally taken to be interdefinable: the received view is that "at least n" and "at most n" are equivalent to "more than n-1" and "fewer than n+1", respectively. Notwithstanding the prima facie plausibility of this claim, Geurts and Nouwen (2007) argue that superlative quantifiers have essentially richer meanings than comparative ones. Geurts and Nouwen's theory makes three kinds of predictions that can be tested by experimental means. First, it predicts that superlative and comparative quantifiers should give rise to different patterns of reasoning. Second, the theory leads us to expect that children will master comparative quantifiers before superlative ones. Third, superlative quantifiers should be harder to process than comparative ones. We present three experiments that confirm these predictions. (Contains 7 footnotes and 8 tables.)

Training for effective communication in high-stakes environments actively promotes targeted communicative strategies. One oft-recommended strategy is closed-loop communication (CLC), which emphasises three components to signal understanding: call-out, checkback and closing of the loop. Using CLC is suggested to improve clinical outcomes, but research indicates that medical practitioners do not always apply CLC in team communication. Our paper analyses a context in which speakers' linguistic choices are guided by explicit recommendations during training, namely out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) resuscitation. We examined 20 real-life OHCA resuscitations to determine whether paramedics adopt CLC in the critical first five minutes after the arrival of the designated team leader (a paramedic specially trained in handling OHCA resuscitation), and what other related communication strategies may be used. The findings revealed that the standard form of CLC was not consistently present in any of the resuscitations despite opportunities to use it. Instead, we found evidence of non-standard forms of CLC and closed-ended communication (containing the first two components of standard CLC). These findings may be representative of what happens when medical practitioners communicate in time-critical, real-life contexts where responses to directives can be immediately observed, and suggest that CLC may not always be necessary for effective communication in these contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A curious fact about the communication of numerical information is that speakers often choose to use approximate or rounded expressions, even when more precise information is available (for instance, reporting the time as 'three thirty' when one's watch reads 3:27). It has been proposed that this tendency towards rounding is driven by a desire to reduce hearers' processing costs, a specific claim being that rounded values produce the same cognitive effect at less cognitive effort than non-round values (Van der Henst, Carles and Sperber, 2002). To date, however, the posited processing advantage for roundness has not been experimentally substantiated. Focusing on the domain of temporal expressions, we report on two experiments that demonstrate that rounded clock times are easier to remember and manipulate than their nonround counterparts, a finding that provides evidence for the influence of processing considerations on numerical expression choice. We further find a role for domainspecific granularity of measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elementary sentences containing the quantificational determiner some seem to be ambiguous between a 'weak' existential meaning ∃ and a 'strengthened' some but not all meaning ∃+. The strengthened meaning is commonly assumed to be the output of a general enrichment mechanism, call it G (for 'global'), that applies to the weak meaning of the sentence: G (∃) = ∃+. The application of G has been shown to come with a processing cost (e.g. Bott & Noveck 2004). We used a self-paced reading task together with offline comprehension questions to investigate the interpretation of sentences containing some when embedded inside a disjunction, a position that G cannot access. Our findings suggest (i) that the strengthened meaning ∃+ is available in embedded positions, suggesting that a mechanism of local strengthening L must be available: L (∃) = ∃+, (ii) that local enrichment can be facilitated by global pragmatic pressures (Chierchia et al. 2008; Mayr & Romoli 2014), (iii) that subjects can be quickly trained to systematically prefer one of G or L to the other, (iv) that application of L, like the application of G, comes with a processing cost. We highlight consequences of our findings for debates about the characterization of enrichment mechanisms, focusing on the relation between G and L . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have investigated how listeners generate scalar implicatures using the under-informative statement paradigm, where participants evaluate statements such as “Some of the cards have a star” as descriptions of situations in which all of the cards have a star. Rejection of the under-informative utterances is taken as evidence that participants have interpreted these sentences with a scalar implicature, to the effect that “Some but not all of the cards have a star”. However, acceptance rates of under-informative utterances exceed 35% in many studies ( Bott and Noveck, 2004; Guasti et al., 2005; Pouscoulous et al., 2007 ; i.a.). The aim of our experimental investigation is to examine the cognitive or personality profile of participants who reject under-informative utterances. We provide empirical evidence that age and working memory capacity significantly predict the rate at which under-informative utterances are rejected, but find little support for influence from a broad range of personality factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carston (2010) proposes that metaphors can be processed via two different routes. In line with the standard Relevance-Theoretic account of loose use, single metaphors are interpreted by a local pragmatic process of meaning adjustment, resulting in the construction of an ad hoc concept. In extended metaphorical passages, by contrast, the reader switches to a second processing mode because the various semantic associates in the passage are mutually reinforcing, which makes the literal meaning highly activated relative to possible meaning adjustments. In the second processing mode the literal meaning of the whole passage is metarepresented and entertained as an ‘imaginary world’ and the intended figurative implications are derived later in processing. The results of three experiments comparing the interpretation of the same target expressions across literal, single-metaphorical and extended-metaphorical contexts, using self-paced reading (Experiment 1), eye-tracking during natural reading (Experiment 2) and cued recall (Experiment 3), offered initial support to Carston's distinction between the processing of single and extended metaphors. We end with a comparison between extended metaphors and allegories, and make a call for further theoretical and experimental work to increase our understanding of the similarities and differences between the interpretation and processing of different figurative uses, single and extended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is widely acknowledged that context influences a variety of pragmatic phenomena, it is not clear how best to articulate this notion of context and thereby explain the nature of its influence. In this paper, we target contextual alternatives that are evoked via focus placement and test how the same contextual manipulation can influence three different phenomena that involve pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature, presupposition, and coreference. We argue that focus placement influences these three phenomena indirectly by providing the listener with information about the likely question under discussion (QUD) that a particular utterance answers (Roberts, 1996/2012). In three listening experiments, we find that the predicted interpretations are indeed made more available when focus placement is added to the final element (to the scalar adjective, to an entity embedded under the negated presupposition trigger, and to the predicate of a pronoun). These findings bring together several distinct strands of work on the effect of focus placement on interpretation all in the domain of pragmatic enrichment. Together they advance our empirical understanding of the relation between focus placement and QUD and highlight commonalities between implicature, presupposition, and coreference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike many aspects of human language, pragmatics involves a systematic many-to-many mapping between form and meaning. This renders the computational problems of encoding and decoding meaning especially challenging, both for humans in normal conversation and for artificial dialogue systems that need to understand their users' input. A particularly striking example of this difficulty is the recognition of speech act or dialogue act types. In this review, we discuss why this is a problem and why its solution is potentially relevant both for our understanding of human interaction and for the implementation of artificial systems. We examine some of the theoretical and practical attempts that have been made to overcome this problem and consider how the field might develop in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has historically been assumed that comparative (‘more than’, ‘fewer/less than’) and superlative (‘at most’, ‘at least’) quantifiers can be semantically analysed in accordance with their core logical–mathematical properties. However, recent theoretical and experimental work has cast doubt on the validity of this assumption. Geurts & Nouwen (2007) have claimed that superlative quantifiers possess an additional modal component in their semantics that is absent from comparative quantifiers and that this accounts for the previously neglected differences in usage and interpretation between the two types of quantifier that they identify. Their semantically modal hypothesis has received additional support from empirical investigations. In this article, we further corroborate that superlative quantifiers have additional modal interpretations. However, we propose an alternative analysis, whereby these quantifiers possess the semantics postulated by the classical model and the additional aspects of meaning arise as a consequence of psychological complexity and pragmatic implicature. We explain how this model is consistent with the existing empirical findings. Additionally, we present the findings of four novel experiments that support our model above the semantically modal account. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We encourage Pickering & Garrod (P&G) to implement this promising theory in a computational model. The proposed theory crucially relies on having an efficient and reliable mechanism for early intention recognition. Furthermore, the generation of impoverished predictions is incompatible with a number of key phenomena that motivated P&G's theory. Explaining these phenomena requires fully specified perceptual predictions in both comprehension and production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]