---
title: "Strategic conversation — paper by Asher and Lascarides (2013)"
description: "The authors then build a game-theoretic account of dialogue based on preferences and discourse… 61 references, cited by 15 papers here."
authors: ["Nicholas Asher", "Alex Lascarides"]
year: 2013
venue: "Semantics and Pragmatics"
source: "https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.6.2"
doi: "10.3765/sp.6.2"
licence: "CC BY (Semantics and Pragmatics, journal policy)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/asher-2013-strategic-conversation/"
---
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# Strategic conversation

**Authors:** [Nicholas Asher](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/nicholas-asher/) and [Alex Lascarides](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/alex-lascarides/) · **Year:** 2013 · **Venue:** [Semantics and Pragmatics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semantics-and-pragmatics/) ([Semantics and Pragmatics 2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semantics-and-pragmatics/2013/)) · **Publisher:** [Linguistic Society of America](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/linguistic-society-of-america/) · **Licence:** [CC BY (Semantics and Pragmatics, journal policy)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.2) · [PDF](https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/download/sp.6.2/pdf) · [DOI 10.3765/sp.6.2](https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.2) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4205363819)

**Citations:** 202 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [15](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/asher-2013-strategic-conversation/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Grice-style accounts explain implicature by assuming that speakers share goals. Many real exchanges break that assumption: cross-examinations, political debates, a jealous partner's interrogation. Speakers there still trigger implicatures and even exploit them to mislead. Asher and Lascarides first spell out Gricean maxims as defeasible rules. They show that a scalar implicature like Bronston's evasive answer about Swiss accounts cannot be derived once Strong Cooperativity fails. Yet listeners plainly draw it. The authors then build a game-theoretic account of dialogue based on preferences and discourse coherence. It separates rhetorical cooperativity, meaning moves that look like a cooperative reply, from genuine alignment of intentions. Cooperative and strategic versions of a dialogue differ not in which implicatures arise but in their safety, meaning how reliably an inference can count as part of the speaker's public record. A symbolic, proof-theoretic counterpart models resource-bounded reasoners. It proves that Gricean cooperativity corresponds to aligned preferences, encoded as CP-nets. This gives one framework covering both friendly and adversarial talk.

## Key points
- Motivating examples:
  - The Bronston perjury cross-examination (from Solan & Tiersma 2005): the answer is literally true but implicates a false negative answer.
  - Janet replying "Valentino has mononucleosis" to a jealous question about seeing him.
- Six defeasible principles are formalised: Rationality, Sincerity, Quantity, Competence, Sincerity about Intentions, Strong Cooperativity. The paper shows that the standard derivation of "some → not all" depends on Strong Cooperativity.
- Central new notion: the *safety* of an implicature, defined as whether it can reliably be treated as a public commitment. Misdirecting speakers can plausibly deny commitment to implicatures that are unsafe.
- Formal results (proved in the Appendix):
  - Lemma 1: players obeying Gricean principles with acyclic, "realistic" CP-nets normally have isomorphic preferences.
  - Lemma 2: the same holds for simple cycles.
  - General CP-nets are handled by collapsing cycles into units and inducting.
- Published in Semantics and Pragmatics vol. 6 (2013), 62 pages; supported by ERC grant 269,427.

## Interesting ideas
- Keep rhetorical cooperativity (the reply has the shape of an answer) apart from real cooperativity (the speaker shares your goal), because the first can occur without the second.
- Treat an implicature as a candidate commitment with a safety status, not as a fact, and let it be safe only when the context supports trusting the speaker.
- Write maxims as defeasible rules and trace which rule blocks a derivation; this makes it explicit why an inference fails in an adversarial context.
- Contrast the cooperative and non-cooperative versions of the same exchange: the implicatures are identical, but their reliability differs.
- Model each agent's preferences as a CP-net, so that alignment or conflict of preferences becomes checkable structure.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): The speech-act layer in prag can label a reply as an indirect answer by its discourse shape, and record separately whether the speaker's goals are assumed aligned.
- **I2** (world): Store implicated content in the world of the text as "committed-by-implicature, safe/unsafe" rather than merging it into true states.
- **I3** (frames): Implicature derivations in prag can log which default (Sincerity, Competence, Cooperativity) fired or was defeated, which keeps every step explainable.
- **I4** (learn): Build paired test items in which only the speaker's trustworthiness changes, as a negative control checking that the system adjusts belief and not just interpretation.
- **I5** (answer): In fables with tricksters (fox and crow), represent the characters' conflicting preferences explicitly, so the reader can explain who misleads whom and why.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Edinburgh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-edinburgh/) — University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom · 255 works · 68,771 citations
- [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/centre-national-de-la-recherche-scientifique/) — Research institute, Paris, France · 104 works · 60,877 citations
- [Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/institut-de-recherche-en-informatique-de-toulouse/) — Research institute, Toulouse, France · 23 works · 1,667 citations

📚 Shelves (4): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works · [🎯 Decision Sciences](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/decision-sciences/) · 85 works · [🎯 Management Science and Operations Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/decision-sciences/management-science-and-operations-research/) · 36 works

🧭 Topics (1): [😉 Implicature](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/implicature/) · 72 works

## Cite

Cite as: Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides. 2013. Strategic conversation. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{asher2013strategic,
  title = {{Strategic conversation}},
  author = {Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.6.2},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.2}
}
```

- [← previous Combining Intra- and Multi-sentential Rhetorical Parsing for Document-level Discourse Analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/joty-2013-combining-intra-multi-sentential-rhetorical/)
- [next → Squibs: What Is a Paraphrase?](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bhagat-2013-squibs-what-is-paraphrase/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2013/)

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*Updated 24 October 2026*