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Annual Review of Linguistics

Volume 9, 2023

The Rational Speech Act Framework

Abstract

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

Keyword(s): computational pragmatics, context, experimental pragmatics, experimental semantics, probabilistic pragmatics
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2023-01-17
2024-04-25
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The Rational Speech Act Framework
Annual Review of Linguistics 9, 519 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-010811
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-010811
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-010811
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