Pragmatics as social inference about intentional action

Pragmatic inferences are based on assumptions about how speakers communicate: speakers are taken to be cooperative and rational; they consider alternatives and make intentional choices to produce maximally informative – linguistic or non-linguistic – utterances. We test key implications of this view across six experiments with American-English speaking adults (N = 231). Experiments 1a and 1b showed that participants made pragmatic inferences based on different types of communicative actions, some being non-linguistic. In Experiment 2, pragmatic inferences were found to be conditional on the speaker's epistemic states. Finally, Experiments 3a to 3c showed that pragmatic inferences were made only when the communicative signal was produced intentionally. Taken together, these results strengthen the view of pragmatics as social inferences about cooperative communicative behavior.