Quality and Quantity of Information Exchange
Journal of Logic, Language and Information
What game theory can do for NLG: the case of vague language
ENLG '09 Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation
Evolutionarily stable communication and pragmatics
Language, games, and evolution
Trust games as a model for requests
ESSLLI'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on New Directions in Logic, Language and Computation
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In this paper I argue for a broad game theoretical perspective on language use. Polite linguistic behavior, in particular, should be taken as rational interaction of conversational partners that each come with their own beliefs and preferences. I argue that the function of making a request in a polite way is to turn a situation in which preferences are not well aligned to one where they are by assuming that to utter polite expressions is costly. This idea will be formalized by making use of Lewisean signaling games and the biological handicap principle.