In conversation, speakers often felicitously underspecify the content of their speech acts, leaving audiences uncertain about what they mean. This article discusses how such underspecification and the resulting uncertainty can be used deliberately, and manipulatively, to achieve a range of noncommunicative conversational goals—including minimizing conversational conflict, manufacturing acceptance or perceived agreement, and gaining or bolstering status. The article argues that speakers who manipulatively underspecify their speech acts in this way engage in a mock speech act called pied piping. In pied piping, a speaker leaves open a range of interpretations for a speech act while preserving both plausible deniability and plausible assertability; depending on how the audience responds, the speaker can retroactively commit to any of the interpretations left open, and so try to retroactively update the common ground. The article goes on to develop a model of how pied piping functions that incorporates game-theoretic elements into the more traditional common ground framework in order to capture the uncertainty of updating.
Justin D’Ambrosio (Tue,) studied this question.