Abstract
Conversation is often cast as a cooperative effort, and some aspects of it, such as implicatures, have been claimed to depend on an assumption of cooperation (Grice, 1989). But any systematic class of inference derived from assumptions of cooperation, such as implicatures, could also be, on occasion, used to deceive listeners strategically. Here, we explore the extent to which speakers might choose different kinds of implicature triggers in an uncooperative game of communication. Concretely, we present a study in the form of a cooperative or competitive signaling game where communicators can exploit three kinds of implicatures: exact reading of numeral expressions, scalar implicatures linked to the quantifier some and ad hoc scalar implicatures. We compare how these implicatures are used depending on whether the participants' co-player is cooperative, a strategic opponent, or a non-strategic opponent. We find that when the strategy of the co-player is clear to the participants, the three types of implicatures are used to exploit the co-player's interpretation strategy. Indeed, participants use numeral implicatures as reliably as truth conditional content in all three conditions, while scalar quantifiers and ad hoc implicature elicit different strategies. We interpret these findings as evidence that speakers expect their interlocutors to infer implicatures from their utterances even in contexts where they know that they will be perceived as uncooperative.
Highlights
Grice (1989) famously presents conversation as a cooperative activity in which participants abide by a cooperative principle, which binds them to make appropriate contributions to the conversation
If I tell you that I used some of your new shampoo in a context where it would be relevant and more informative to know whether I used all of your shampoo, you may infer that the reason why I am violating the first maxim of quantity is that the more informative statement is not true and infer the implicature that I did not use all of your shampoo
The last two decades witnessed a wave of experimental investigation of how different types of quantity implicatures are processed and interpreted; and in harmony with Grice’s account, these investigations have focused on situations where the cooperation and honesty of the speaker is taken for granted
Summary
Grice (1989) famously presents conversation as a cooperative activity in which participants abide by a cooperative principle, which binds them to make appropriate contributions to the conversation From this principle follow more specific maxims such as the first maxim of quantity: “Make your contribution as informative as is required” The speaker can violate the first maxim of quantity to communicate a quantity implicature. The very few existing comprehension studies on this topic suggest that listeners faced with an uncooperative speaker tend to infer less implicatures than if they are faced with a cooperative speaker (Dulcinati, 2018; Dulcinati & Pouscoulous, 2017; Pryslopska, 2013). Reporting players had an incentive to be uninformative or misleading, because they would win if their opponent failed to guess their color sequence correctly after a fixed number of moves. The authors found that some speakers, but not all, tended to select under-informative quantifier expressions
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