Abstract
Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse connective production may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use.
Highlights
A speaker faces a number of choices when encoding a discourse relation: they can choose whether to leave it implicit, or mark the relation explicitly using a discourse connective
We believe that this discrepancy in results can be attributed to the differences in the stimuli we use: our stimuli include a different distribution of ambiguous Discourse connectives (DC) and their unambiguous alternatives compared to Yung and Demberg (2018)
A possible explanation would be that people perform rational speech act model (RSA)-style reasoning only in a game setting, where (i) meta-reasoning about what the listener will choose as a coherence relation is encouraged, and where (ii) reasoning about listener interpretation is facilitated by explicitly showing the alternative interpretations, i.e., this inference does not have to be performed by the speaker, and by rewarding the speaker if the listener would guess correctly
Summary
A speaker faces a number of choices when encoding a discourse relation: they can choose whether to leave it implicit, or mark the relation explicitly using a discourse connective. Discourse connectives (DC) are linguistic devices that signal coherence relations. Discourse theories such as the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST; Mann and Thompson, 1988) distinguish between a large number of coherence relations and corresponding DCs; there is no one-to-one correspondence between them. The rational speech act model (RSA) is a Bayesian computational framework based on Gricean pragmatic principles, which state that speakers try to be informative based on the knowledge shared with the listeners. In the basic RSA model, the speaker reasons about a literal listener, who chooses an interpretation that is compatible with the utterance in context (Equation 3)
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