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Evolutionary Explanations of Indicatives and Imperatives

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Abstract

Recently there has been some interest in studying the explanation of meaning by using signaling games. I shall argue that the meaning of signals in signaling games remains sufficiently unclear to motivate further investigation. In particular, the possibility of distinguishing imperatives and indicatives at a fundamental level will be explored. Thereby I am trying to preserve the generality of the signaling games framework while bringing it closer to human languages. A number of convergence results for the evolutionary dynamics of our models will be proved.

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Acknowledgements

The paper profited most from discussions with Brian Skyrms and Bill Harms. Moreover, I am grateful to Peter Hurd, Natasha Komarova, Don Saari and Kevin Zollman for their assistance, and to an anonymous referee for a number of useful suggestions.

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Correspondence to Simon M. Huttegger.

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Huttegger, S.M. Evolutionary Explanations of Indicatives and Imperatives. Erkenntnis 66, 409–436 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-006-9022-1

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