Abstract
This paper proposes a strategic analysis of politeness strategies stated in terms of game theory. After reviewing some facts about lexical strategies for linguistic politeness, we turn to our game-theoretic account, which involves treating polite and impolite acts as action choices in an indefinitely repeated game. We show that such games have winning strategies and that these strategies can be of differing degrees of complexity in a mathematical sense. Finally, we outline some avenues for future work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Asher, N.: The non cooperative basis of implicatures. In: Béchet, D., Dikovsky, A. (eds.) LACL 2012. LNCS, vol. 7351, pp. 45–57. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Asher, N., Quinley, J.: Begging questions, their answers and basic cooperativity. In: Okumura, M., Bekki, D., Satoh, K. (eds.) JSAI-isAI 2012. LNCS, vol. 7258, pp. 3–12. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Brown, P., Levinson, S.: Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press (1987)
Crawford, V., Sobel, J.: Strategic information transmission. Econometrica 50(6), 1431–1451 (1982)
Farrell, J.: Meaning and credibility in cheap-talk games. Games and Economic Behavior 5(4), 514–531 (1993)
Farrell, J., Rabin, M.: Cheap talk. Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, 103–118 (1996)
Gale, D., Stewart, F.M.: Infinite games with perfect information. Annals of Mathematical Studies 28, 245–266 (1953)
Kechris, A.: Descriptive Set Theory. Springer (1995)
Martin, D.A.: Borel determinacy. Annals of Mathematics 102(2), 363–371 (1975)
McCready, E.: Varieties of conventional implicature. Semantics and Pragmatics 3, 1–57 (2010)
McCready, E.: Emotive equilibria. Linguistics and Philosophy 35, 243–283 (2012)
McCready, E.: Pragmatic reliability. Aoyama Gakuin University (2012) (manuscript)
Niinuma, F.: The Syntax of Honorification. Ph.D. thesis, University of Connecticut (2003)
Potts, C.: The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford University Press (2005), revised version of 2003 UCSC dissertation
Potts, C., Kawahara, S.: Japanese honorifics as emotive definite descriptions. In: Proceedings of SALT XIV (2004)
Quinley, J.: Trust games as a model for requests. In: Lassiter, D., Slavkovik, M. (eds.) ESSLLI Student Sessions. LNCS, vol. 7415, pp. 221–233. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Sells, P., Kim, S.S.: Korean npis scope over negation. Language Research 42, 275–297 (2006)
Wolfe, P.: The strict determinateness of certain infinite games. Pacific Journal of Mathematics 5(1), 841–847 (1955)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
McCready, E., Asher, N., Paul, S. (2013). Winning Strategies in Politeness. In: Motomura, Y., Butler, A., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7856. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39931-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39931-2_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39930-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39931-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)