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Strategic conversation

Paper · 2013 · Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides

Summary

Grice-style accounts explain implicature by assuming that speakers share goals. Many real exchanges break that assumption: cross-examinations, political debates, a jealous partner's interrogation. Speakers there still trigger implicatures and even exploit them to mislead. Asher and Lascarides first spell out Gricean maxims as defeasible rules. They show that a scalar implicature like Bronston's evasive answer about Swiss accounts cannot be derived once Strong Cooperativity fails. Yet listeners plainly draw it. The authors then build a game-theoretic account of dialogue based on preferences and discourse coherence. It separates rhetorical cooperativity, meaning moves that look like a cooperative reply, from genuine alignment of intentions. Cooperative and strategic versions of a dialogue differ not in which implicatures arise but in their safety, meaning how reliably an inference can count as part of the speaker's public record. A symbolic, proof-theoretic counterpart models resource-bounded reasoners. It proves that Gricean cooperativity corresponds to aligned preferences, encoded as CP-nets. This gives one framework covering both friendly and adversarial talk.

Key points

  • Motivating examples:
    • The Bronston perjury cross-examination (from Solan & Tiersma 2005): the answer is literally true but implicates a false negative answer.
    • Janet replying "Valentino has mononucleosis" to a jealous question about seeing him.
  • Six defeasible principles are formalised: Rationality, Sincerity, Quantity, Competence, Sincerity about Intentions, Strong Cooperativity. The paper shows that the standard derivation of "some → not all" depends on Strong Cooperativity.
  • Central new notion: the safety of an implicature, defined as whether it can reliably be treated as a public commitment. Misdirecting speakers can plausibly deny commitment to implicatures that are unsafe.
  • Formal results (proved in the Appendix):
    • Lemma 1: players obeying Gricean principles with acyclic, "realistic" CP-nets normally have isomorphic preferences.
    • Lemma 2: the same holds for simple cycles.
    • General CP-nets are handled by collapsing cycles into units and inducting.
  • Published in Semantics and Pragmatics vol. 6 (2013), 62 pages; supported by ERC grant 269,427.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Keep rhetorical cooperativity (the reply has the shape of an answer) apart from real cooperativity (the speaker shares your goal), because the first can occur without the second.
  • I2. Treat an implicature as a candidate commitment with a safety status, not as a fact, and let it be safe only when the context supports trusting the speaker.
  • I3. Write maxims as defeasible rules and trace which rule blocks a derivation; this makes it explicit why an inference fails in an adversarial context.
  • I4. Contrast the cooperative and non-cooperative versions of the same exchange: the implicatures are identical, but their reliability differs.
  • I5. Model each agent's preferences as a CP-net, so that alignment or conflict of preferences becomes checkable structure.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): The speech-act layer in prag can label a reply as an indirect answer by its discourse shape, and record separately whether the speaker's goals are assumed aligned.
  • I2 (world): Store implicated content in the world of the text as "committed-by-implicature, safe/unsafe" rather than merging it into true states.
  • I3 (frames): Implicature derivations in prag can log which default (Sincerity, Competence, Cooperativity) fired or was defeated, which keeps every step explainable.
  • I4 (learn): Build paired test items in which only the speaker's trustworthiness changes, as a negative control checking that the system adjusts belief and not just interpretation.
  • I5 (answer): In fables with tricksters (fox and crow), represent the characters' conflicting preferences explicitly, so the reader can explain who misleads whom and why.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of EdinburghEdinburgh · United Kingdom255 works · 68,771 citations🔬Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueParis · France104 works · 60,877 citations🔬Institut de Recherche en Informatique de ToulouseToulouse · France23 works · 1,667 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksDecision Sciences · 85 worksManagement Science and Operations Research · 36 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 72 works

Cite

Cite as Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides. 2013. Strategic conversation. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.6.2

@article{asher2013strategic,
  title = {{Strategic conversation}},
  author = {Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.6.2},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.2}
}

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