Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic Use.

We present a game-theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our model traces two evolutionary forces and their interaction: (i) pressure toward communicative efficiency and (ii) transmission perturbations during the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. We illustrate the model based on a case study on scalar implicatures, which suggests that the relationship between underspecified semantics and pragmatic inference is one of coevolution. PMID: 30294804 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Cognitive Science - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cogn Sci Source Type: research