Asya Achimova: A neo-Gricean account of indirect communication

Indirect utterances, such as “The election outcome was interesting!” appear suboptimal from the point of view of efficient information transmission. However, we can still see the choice of indirect utterances as rational if we include social utility in the factors that determine utterance choice. We offer a Rational Speech Act model of indirect communication that captures (1) the speaker’s choice of indirect utterances; (2) the inferences conversation partners draw about the meaning of indirect utterances when they occur as a response in a conversation. We show that model predictions qualitatively match data from three behavioral experiments.

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