Optimal Assertions, and what they Implicate. A uniform game theoretic approach

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogues are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij, 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz, 2006). In this paper we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures.