May 6: Eric McCready

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) for our fourth workshop talk of the quarter.


‘Hedging, Cooperation and Conditionals’

DATE: Friday, May 6, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: Communication is generally supposed to be cooperative in a way characterized by Gricean maxims. However, in many situations, the interests of communicators are opposed and there is incentive to be deceptive or to withhold information. Why then does cooperation arise? This question has been widely discussed in economics and biology in the context of game theory. Using (a version of) a model from this literature, I consider ways in which negative results of actual noncooperative linguistic behavior can be avoided by further linguistic acts. The result is analyses of hedges, for damage limitation on semantic content, and so-called relevance conditionals, for avoiding consequences of bad pragmatic discourse moves.