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LIT-809: That's what she (could have) said: How alternative utterances affect language use

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Properties6
StatusActive — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-613); worth reading as the paper in which the RSA recursion is made to derive Horn's division of pragmatic labour (costlier forms for less likely meanings) in one-shot signalling games with no prior conventions: the basic recursion cannot break the symmetry between equally meaningless costly and cheap signals, but a listener and speaker uncertain about the lexicon, marginalizing over every lexicon that could assign the signals meanings, converge on the efficient mapping without an equilibrium-selection rule. Two small Mechanical Turk games (40 and 140 participants) show people drawing specificity and Horn implicatures among novel symbols in five rounds, with no first-round difference. Source, with LIT-821 and LIT-816, of THEORY-172.
Version2
Tagspragmatics, linguistics, game-theory, cognition, probabilistic-modeling
Cited as “grounds” byARG-040 — In use, an utterance is interpreted by its contrast with the alternatives its speaker could have used, so what a translation must let a receiver reconstruct is those contrasts, not the wording or the proposition
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-613 — That's what she (could have) said
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-172 — In Frank and Goodman's one-shot reference games, listeners' mean bets matched a parameter-free listener inverting a speaker who chooses among true utterances by informativeness, with a separately measured salience prior, and not salience alone; and in Bergen, Goodman and Levy's signalling games with novel symbols, listeners read a signal as excluding what the available alternative would have conveyed, THEORY-785 — Listeners interpret an utterance by inverting a model of a speaker who chooses among alternatives by informativeness, so what a fixed form conveys depends on what else the speaker could have said, as the rational speech act account of Frank, Goodman and coauthors proposes

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Leon Bergen, Noah D. Goodman and Roger Levy (2012), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 120–125 — https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f03m09d

Key takeaways

  • The base model. L₀(m|u) ∝ L_u(m)P(m); S_n(u|m) ∝ exp(λU_n(u|m)), U_n = log L_{n−1}(m|u) − c(u); L_n(m|u) ∝ P(m)S_{n−1}(u|m). With a specific and a general utterance (“pyramid”, “shape”) the general one is read as the meaning the specific one excludes, and the tendency goes to probability 1 with depth for λ > 1.
  • Why costs alone fail. If two signals are both literally all-true and differ only in cost, L₀ reads both as the prior, S₁ just disprefers the costly one, and nothing breaks the symmetry. This is the multiple-equilibrium problem of signalling games.
  • Lexical uncertainty. Let each utterance’s literal meaning be any non-trivial truth function, put a uniform prior over the seven lexicons in the 2 × 2 case, and let L_n marginalize over them. A speaker who means the unlikely meaning gains from a costly signal that pins it down; a speaker who means the likely one does not, since L₀ already reads the cheap signal as likely. So L₂ prefers the efficient mapping, and higher levels sharpen it. Shown also for three meanings and three costs.
  • Experiment 1 (40 participants): two objects, an iconic triangle and an alien symbol; listeners read the alien symbol as the cube on every trial, speakers used it for the cube on every trial.
  • Experiment 2 (140 participants): three objects at 60/30/10% and messages costing 0.01 and $0.02; speakers and listeners used the efficient mapping (mixed logit, all six comparisons p < .001), with no first-round effect in five of six response types.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-09 at the owner’s request, from the manuscript bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work what-survives-translation): one of the works the manuscript considered and dropped from its final reference list.

Read on 2026-10-09 (NOTE-613). With LIT-821 and LIT-816 it is the source of THEORY-172. Its premise, common knowledge of communicative goals, and its signalling games are Lewis’s (LIT-473, filed but not read); the paper’s point is that in such games the efficient conventions can be reached by reasoning in one shot, without the precedent or evolution Lewis’s conventions rest on.

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