Abstract
The past decade has seen the rapid development of a new approach to pragmatics that attempts to integrate insights from formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and computational cognitive science in the study of meaning: probabilistic pragmatics. The most influential probabilistic approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this review, I demonstrate the basic mechanics and commitments of RSA as well as some of its standard extensions, highlighting the key features that have led to its success in accounting for a wide variety of pragmatic phenomena. Fundamentally, it treats language as probabilistic, informativeness as gradient, alternatives as context-dependent, and subjective prior beliefs (world knowledge) as a crucial facet of interpretation. It also provides an integrated account of the link between production and interpretation. I highlight key challenges for RSA, which include scalability, the treatment of the boundedness of cognition, and the incremental and compositional nature of language.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.