Potential examples of rule dynamics in linguistics

productivity vs lexicalization

incentive

Cheap talk - complex signalling moves

This paper is a very loose sketch of a class of scenarios that would be great fun to develop richer accounts of.

an entire class of examples that consitute "zooming in" on a frame-by-frame of one's personal reasoning around phrasing, trying to catch the moment where one does "semiosis" and the ways our salient incentives influence or decide the nature of the action.

Lateness signalling

I read an article a long while ago (link pending) about a study that shows people report their ETAs with consistent overoptimism; the article's take was that the social cost of 5 minutes of reported-lateness and 5 minutes of deviation-from-report was less than 10 minutes of reported-lateness.

Tabooing, especially euphemism

A risky conversation leads to attempts to cull entry points to such conversations from dialogue. But at what point does the pragmatics - "don't talk about this" - ascend to semiotics - "use a different signal for this concept"? Why is this a viable strategy? Euphemisms are treadmills, so the effect wears off, at roughly the same pace that the referent attaches to its new meaning firmly. Theories:

• the point of a euphemism is to create uncertainty in order to cull dialogue-trees that begin with moves engaging with the taboo concept (by making it less likely that any given listener has access to the meaning of the euphemism.) This effect loses power when the knowledge of the signal-concept map becomes widespread.

• instead of creating uncertainty, a euphemism creates something like plausible deniability around its meaning - everyone understands that if a concept is referred to "euphemistically", that means that the speaker is indicating that they don't wish to engage in risky conversations involving that concept. In this theory, the culling of those dialogue trees is cooperative. This effect loses power when the "nonstandard" refernce becomes the standard.

• the relationship between words and the dialogues they are used in is such that the "associations" of a word seem to attach to the word itself - and therefore changing the word one uses to refer to a concept serves to shed those associations, ie to allow one to signal that they wish to have a different kind of conversation to the type that the old word attaches to. euphemism is a special case of this effect used specifically to evade risk in conversations.

Sarcasm, and other Gricean flouting

• we get "logical connectives" as part of the lexicon

  • alternately, the cooperative principle is part of the protocol, and protocol-editing moves are part of the lexicon

• solving coordination games with schelling points relies on being able to draw from the space of things within a small edit distance of what one might originally assume

• an assertion A is made that makes no sense, so one casts about for nearby meanings

• "the protocol has been changed, or excepted from" is a move that creates a more plausible nearby meaning

• sarcasm has been achieved

• emotional underpinnings of sarcasm - aggression, humiliation - are already well explained by gricean flouting account

• while Gricean cooperation is flouted, coordination-game coordination is needed for successful communication to even occur

Durability of common knowledge

If common context gets baked in to a community as assumptions, these probably have a longevity far greater than the creating context itself. Hence the entire field of etymology. So, evolutionary accounts of language, but which note that evolution's relationship to information is both about its instrumental value and its value as convention.

dissent is individual, which is why collective negations can only happen through the frankly roundabout mechanism of taboo.

Saying "no" acknowledges the thing you're responding to as having enough weight to be noticed in the first place. "No" is a transformation that just doesn't survive intact through the transmission and lensing of the collective illusion. This fact is there, buried in the reflexive mistrust of protest, in the invitation to suspicion being inescapably double-edged as a rhetorical tool..."no" invites pruning, it invites criticality and logic, the exercise of reasoning over priors, and being the purest, most effective tool for the generation of powerful (useful, correct, effective, unpredicatable, unsimulable, fearsome) ideas that we have, is therefore much, much cheaper for an individual, and less risky, than it could ever be for a society. The mechanism of taboo, therefore, functions as an attempt at inoculation. It's an act of name-stealing, or dilution, of confusion. If you want certain things not to be thought, these roundabout mechanisms are all that you could hope to see working.