Guess Who’s Coming (and Who’s Going): Bringing Perspective to the Rational Speech Acts Framework

Grammatical Perspective-Taking in Comprehension and Production

“…We test the differing predictions of these models in a series of comprehension and production experiments using the perspectival motion verb come as a case study. To foreshadow our results, our comprehension studies ( Perspective Inference in Comprehension section and Comprehension Experiments section) suggest that listeners reason simultaneously over multiple perspectives, as in the simultaneous integration model proposed by Anderson and Dillon ( 2019 ), consistent with Heller et al ( 2016 ) and Ryskin et al ( 2020 )’s analysis of perspective-taking in reference. However, our production findings ( Perspective Selection in Production section and Production Experiments section) are more mixed: we find support for only one of the simultaneous integration model’s two key predictions.…”

“…However, others have proposed that go is infelicitous there because of pragmatic competition with come (Sudo, 2018 ; Wilkins & Hill, 1995 ), which leads to an anti-perspectival inference when go is used. The modeling work presented in Anderson and Dillon ( 2019 ) suggests that both views are viable and empirically difficult to distinguish. We use a perspectival semantics for go, though our core predictions do not rest on it.…”

“…More recent work takes inspiration from models proposed for reference perspective-taking and posits that the preference is a result of egocentric bias (Anderson & Dillon, 2019 ; Harris, 2012 ; Watson et al, 2021 ). In this view, there is a general cognitive bias towards self perspectives, which causes speakers to preferentially use their own perspectives when producing perspectival expressions.…”

“…Anderson and Dillon ( 2019 ) propose a simultaneous integration model of grammatical perspective-taking formulated in the Rational Speech Acts framework. In this model, listeners probabilistically reason jointly about the speaker’s intended meaning and their adopted perspective using a mental model of the speaker’s production process.…”

“…In this paper, we re-visit the question of egocentric bias in a less well-studied domain of perspective-taking: the production and comprehension of grammatically perspectival expressions. We lay out various models of perspective inference and selection for perspectival expressions (Anderson & Dillon, 2019 ; Harris, 2012 ; Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977 ), focusing in particular on two models of grammatical perspective-taking: a serial model, the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model; and a parallel model, the simultaneous integration model ( Modeling Grammatical Perspective-Taking section).…”