Language is one of the most precious gifts nature has bestowed upon us. It allows us to cooperate better with other individuals by enabling us to communicate useful and relevant information. What is it about language and our use of it that allows us to do so? It is the combination of stable linguistic rules and flexible reasoning. On the one hand, what we intend to communicate, - the meaning of the utterance - is to a large extent governed by shared rules that we all make use of. On the other hand, we often communicate more by the use of an expression than can be derived from these linguistic rules alone, and this depends on (features of) context and the assumption that speakers are rational cooperative language users. In this edited volume a number of leading scholars investigate which factors are favourable to the emergence and sustenance of linguistic rules, and how we use rationality principles to infer what is communicated in actual conversation. (Evolutionary) game theory provides the unified framework in which these issues are addressed and the Introduction to the volume provides the reader with enough background in game theory to follow the discussion.

Introduction; A.Benz, G.Jäger & R.van Rooij
Saying and Meaning, Cheap Talk and Credibility; R.Stalnaker
Pragmatics and Games of Partial Information; P.Parikh
Game Theory and Communication; N.Allott
Different Faces of Risky Speech; R.van Rooij & M.Sevenster
Pragmatic Reasoning, Defaults and Discourse Structure; N.Asher & M.Williams
Utility and Relevance of Answers; A.Benz
Game Theoretic Grounding; K.de Jaegher
A Game Theoretic Approach to the Pragmatics of Debates: An Expository Note; J.Glazer & A.Rubinstein
On the Evolutionary Dynamics of Meaning/Word Associations; T.Lenaerts & B.de Vylder

ANTON BENZ is Assistant Professor of Humanistic Information Science at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding. His main research interests lie in the field of formal pragmatics and dialogue modelling.

GERHARD JÄEGER is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. He has published on a variety of topics relating to semantics, pragmatics and the mathematics of language. His current focus of interest is the application of evolutionary models to linguistics.

ROBERT VAN ROOIJ is a Senior Staff Member of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), stationed at the Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He has published on a variety of topics relating to formal semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, and the evolution of language.