Relevance and Utility in an Argumentative Framework: An Application to the Accommodation of Discourse Topics

In this paper, we address the question of the exact place one should attribute to game theory in the analysis and modelisation of meaning in natural language. One can think of at least three possible positions with respect to this issue:

1

Game theory is not inscribed at all in the grammar, but is an effective framework to describe effects of language use (that is, a formal method of dealing with pragmatics)

2

Every aspect of game theory has grammatical effects, i.e. any kind of pay-off is inscribed in the semantics of linguistic items.

3

Grammar deals with a specific type of games. If this should be the case, linguists need to identify the relevant subpart of game theory.

We will focus in our paper on positions (1) and (3). A plausible candidate for a linguistic phenomenon that can be successfully modeled by a subset of game-theory is

argumentation

(cf. Ducrot (1980)). Argumentation concerns aspects of the meaning of sentences (words) that are not reducible to truth conditions. As such, one may ask whether these aspects are properly grammatical (i.e., encoded in the linguistic system), or pertain to the realm of pragmatics (i.e., contextual effects).