Rationality, Cooperation and Conversational Implicature

Conversational implicatures are usually described as being licensed by the disobeying or flouting of a Principle of Cooperation. However, the specification of this principle has proved computationally elusive. In this paper we suggest that a more useful concept is rationality. Such a concept can be specified explicitely in planning terms and we argue that speakers perform utterances as part of the optimal plan for their particular communicative goals. Such an assumption can be used by the hearer to infer conversational implicatures implicit in the speaker’s utterance.