Workshop at ESSLLI 2021 — Approaches to implicature: Rational choice and/or exhaustification

Recent work in implicature has seen a great deal of activity within two lines of research: the rational choice approach associated with game-theoretic pragmatics and the Bayesian Rational Speech Act framework, and the exhaustification-based approach. While these frameworks have generally been thought to be in theoretical tension, there are also underexplored ways to combine them, with the potential to benefit both approaches. The workshop will explore explicit comparisons between the two frameworks as well as efforts to combine them, with the hope of producing a more unified theory of implicature and a more general understanding of the data that such a theory must account for.

Topics: Applications of RSA or other probabilistic pragmatics models to phenomena in semantics/pragmatics; Applications of exhaustification-based approaches to phenomena in semantics/pragmatics, ; Approaches to pragmatic inference that explicitly compare and/or combine theoretical perspectives; Implicature, presupposition, not-at-issue content, expressive meaning, social meaning