Meaning of adjectives through communication; A game theoretical analysis
Robert van Rooij is professor in Logic and Cognition, with special emphasis on language, at the University of Amsterdam. He worked on many topics including pragmatics (e.g. conversational implicatures) and logical paradoxes (the liar, vagueness). He is one of the pioneers using game theory for the analysis of natural language meaning. At the moment he is the director of the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC).
According to a game theoretical analysis, meanings arise due to the communicative pressure between speaker and hearer. In this talk I will give a game theoretical motivation, using signalling games, for the meaning and prototypes of adjectives that are based on a notion of similarity. Afterwards I will show under which circumstances the meaning of these adjectives come out to be vague.
