Quantiative Social-Cognitive Experimental Pragmatics

This thesis argues for a quantitative, social-cognitive, and experimental approach to pragmatics. A formal decision-theoretic framework is proposed to model language production and interpretation in the context of social cognition. The framework is applied to several case studies: (1) use of referential expressions, (2) descriptive use of positive forms of gradable adjectives, and (3) use of quantifiers to give quantitative predictions which are tested against experimental data. We discuss design choices in experimental measure and formal modeling to incorporate various cognitive factors involved in pragmatic phenomena. This approach can shed new light on the meaning and use of language.