This book considers how observations about the past influence future behaviour, as expressed in language. Focusing on information gathered from speech and other evidence sources, the author offers a model of how judgements about reliability can be made, and how such judgements factor into how people treat information they acquire via those sources

• 1: Introduction


• Part I - Reputation and Cooperation


• 2: Cooperation


• 3: Trust and reputations


• 4: Hedging beyond truth


• 5: Deriving hedged interpretations


• Part II - Evidentials and Reliability


• 6: The nature of evidentials


• 7: Evidentials and reliability


• 8: Using priorities


• 9: Testimonial evidence


• 10: Conclusion


• Appendix: Formal system


• References


• Index

Elin McCready is an Associate Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research interests include formal semantics and pragmatics, the semantics-pragmatics interface, Japanese and its dialects, philosophy of language and epistemology, modal and dynamic logics, and game theory. Her articles have appeared in journals including Semantics and Pragmatics, Linguistic Inquiry, and Journal of Pragmatics.