A Game-theoretic Account Of Conversational Communication

Game Theory is one of the most famous and important theories in modern economics. The Sveriges Riksban (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to economists in 1994 and 2005 respectively "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis". Later on, game theory found its way to many fields, such as philosophy, military science, international relations, etc. Gradually it attracted attention from linguists. They put the theory into language conflict analysis. But more work need to be done in this aspect. Nowadays, game theory has been applied to almost every field of human lives. We can hardly avoid it even if we want to turn a deaf ear or a blind eye to it.Based on the assumption of rationality, game theory holds that: in every single game, every player wants to maximize his or her utility by employing a series of interactive strategies (either cooperative or non-cooperative) in order to raise his payoff. But the choice of one player's strategies is constrained not only by his own conditions but also affected by the other players' strategies. A numerical payoff can be set to represent each player's utility. Given that the other players' strategies are certain, each player can find an optimal strategy. If each player in a game can not raise his payoff by changing his strategies unilaterally (a Nash equilibrium is found), then the game is solved. At this point, the game maximizes its utility.Game theory is the study of conflicts and cooperation between rational individuals. Likewise, being rational is also the prerequisite of all human languages. Without rationality, all human languages would be a mass of senseless and unacceptable code. Especially in conversational communication, the speaker and hearer are always trying to convey or interpret some valuable information. In order to do so, both the hearer and the speaker will also employ some strategies (either cooperative or non-cooperative). In some aspect, the Cooperative Principle proposed by H. P. Grice gives an account to the interactive relations between speaker and hearer; but it can not explain why people should abide by those principles.The present paper employs the model of game-theoretic analysis into linguistics, in particular, conversational communication, trying to explain why people take a certain strategy while abandoning the other alternative strategies; why they abide by the CP sometimes and violate them the other times.Through a game-theoretic analysis of some specific linguistic phenomena such as disambiguation, implicature and discourse anaphora, the present paper comes to a conclusion as follows:1. Successful communication highly depends on the strategies chosen by the players in the language game. The choice of strategies is not only constrained by the player himself but also affected by the other players' strategies. What's more, it is also affected by the context (in a broad sense, including not only the linguistic context but also the natural and social context) around the players. The idea of taking context into consideration is a modification and improvement of Parikh's model of language game.2. A successful communication is in fact the Nash equilibrium of the language game.3. Either cooperation or violation of the CP between speaker and hearer in a language game is based on the assumption of rationality—every speaker tries to maximize his or her utility.