Language, Games, and Evolution

1. Front Matter

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2. Language, Games, and Evolution

   1. Language, Games, and Evolution: An Introduction

      • Anton Benz, Christian Ebert, Gerhard Jäger, Robert van Rooij

      Pages 1-13

3. Part I: Non-evolutionary Approaches: Synchronic Phenomena

   1. How to Set Up Normal Optimal Answer Models

      • Anton Benz

      Pages 14-39

   2. Strategic Vagueness, and Appropriate Contexts

      • Kris De Jaegher, Robert van Rooij

      Pages 40-59

   3. Now That You Mention It

      • Michael Franke, Tikitu de Jager

      Pages 60-91

   4. The Role of Speaker Beliefs in Determining Accent Placement

      • James German, Eyal Sagi, Stefan Kaufmann, Brady Clark

      Pages 92-116

4. Part II: Evolutionary Approaches: Diachronic Phenomena

   1. Evolutionarily Stable Communication and Pragmatics

      • Thomas C. Scott-Phillips

      Pages 117-133

   2. Simulating Grice

      • Patrick Grim

      Pages 134-159

   3. Signaling Games

      • Simon M. Huttegger, Kevin J. S. Zollman

      Pages 160-176

   4. Pragmatics, Logic and Information Processing

      • Brian Skyrms

      Pages 177-187

5. Back Matter

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Recent years witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Game and Decision Theory (GDT) are natural candidates if we look for a theoretical foundation of linguistic pragmatics. Over the last decade, a firm research community has emerged with a strong interdisciplinary character, where economists, philosophers, and social scientists meet with linguists. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature and is concerned with the role of game theory in the context of language use, and the third aims at language evolution seen either from a biological or from a cultural perspective. Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this volume is based on a selection of papers of two international conferences, one organised at ESSLLI in 2007 on language, games, and evolution, and the other organised at the ZAS in Berlin on games and decisions in pragmatics in 2008. This volume is rounded off by additional invited papers and now contains eight articles of leading researchers in the field which together provide a state-of-the-art survey of current research on language evolution and game theoretic approaches to pragmatics.

• Gricean paradigm
• awareness dynamics
• biological perspective
• cultural perspective
• decisions in pragmatics
• game theory
• information processing
• language evolution
• language use
• learning models
• optimal answer models
• pragmatic reasoning
• signaling games
• simple answers
• algorithm analysis and problem complexity

• Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany

  Anton Benz

• Department of Linguistics, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany

  Christian Ebert, Gerhard Jäger

• Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  Robert Rooij

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