Schedule

This schedule will be altered during the quarter to suit students' interests. Any changes will be announced in class and via email. An up-to-date version of the syllabus will always be available upon request and on the web.

April 2: Introduction

• Stefan Kaufmann
• Rational interaction: Decisions and Games
• Game theory and linguistic behavior
• Some formal basics: Strategies, equilibria, etc.
• Representations: Normal form, extensive form

April 9: Communication

• Stefan Kaufmann
• Continuation from last week
• Cheap talk
• Signaling games
• Credibility
• Jäger (to appear); Benz et al. (2006b, Sections 1, 2)
  [Lewis (1969)]

April 16: Parikh

• Chris Ahern, Jessica Spencer
• Games of partial information
• Situation semantics
• Implicature, Illocutionary force
• Allott (2006); Parikh (2001)
  [Parikh (2006a,2008); Clark and Parikh (2007)]

April 23: Implicature

• Stefan Kaufmann
• Some experiments in linguistics and elsewhere
• Colman (2003); German et al. (2006)
  [Camerer (2003)]

• Matt Berends and Becky Raffensperger
• Quantity implicatures
• de Jager and van Rooij (2007); van Rooij (to appear)

April 30: Further Topics in GT Pragmatics

• Carl Ehrett
• Vagueness
• de Jaegher (2003); Parikh (1994)

• Will Thompson
• Credibility
• Rationalizability
• Rabin (1990)
  [Stalnaker (2006)]

May 7-21: Reasoning in and about games

• Morteza Dehghani and Jennifer Jhun
• Counterfactual rationality
• Backward induction
• Halpern (2001); Aumann (1995); Stalnaker (1999)
  [Halpern (1999); Samet (1996)]

• Scott Friedman
• Communication in game-theoretic terms
• Stalnaker (2006)

• Seungki Kim
• New directions in Gricean Pragmatics
• Jäger (2008)

May 28: Evolution and Change

• Chris Ahern
• Populations, replicator dynamics
• Evolutionary stability
• Linguistic applications
• Benz et al. (2006b, Section 3)
  [van Rooij (2008,2004a,b)]

• Jiaxi Liu
• Differential case marking
• Jäger (2007a)

June 4: Student presentations

Final papers due by 5pm on Monday, June 9