Optimal Strategies in Linguistic Games

Why is this book in English? An insider can offer several answers, such as these: 1. Because the Editorial Group insisted that all papers be in English. 2. Because English is the native language of the book's honoree. 3. Because all of the authors can write in English, and some can write only in English. 4. Because Mouton can sell more copies of an all-English book than of a plurilingual book. 5. Because more of the existing literature in linguistics is in English than in any other language. These answers, in turn, lead to further questions: Why did the authors do what the Editorial Group asked? Why is English the major language of linguistics? And so on. Explaining a particular linguistic event can involve hypothetical links in an infinitely long and thus intractable causal chain. To avoid an infinite regress, we explain events by limiting the classes of allowable causal links. We may focus entirely on historical, or attitudinal, or biological, or political variables, for example. We create, implicitly or explicitly, rigorously or impressionistically, a closed system with a finite number of kinds of components interacting according to a finite number of rules. If the system is rigorously defined the result can be thought of as the scientific analog to a computerized spread-sheet program. A given set of assumptions yields a given set of results. Change one assumption and the results get recalculated. We have what is popularly called a 'what if' model: it tells us what