The Rational Speech Act Framework

The past decade has seen the rapid development of a new approach to pragmatics that attempts integrate insights from formal and experimental semantics pragmatics, psycholinguistics, computational cognitive science in study meaning: probabilistic pragmatics. most influential is Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this review, I demonstrate basic mechanics commitments RSA as well some its standard extensions, highlighting key features have led success accounting for wide variety pragmatic phenomena. Fundamentally, it treats language probabilistic, informativeness gradient, alternatives context-dependent, subjective prior beliefs (world knowledge) crucial facet interpretation. It also provides an integrated account link between production highlight challenges RSA, which include scalability, treatment boundedness cognition, incremental compositional nature language.