The application of game theory (GT) to natural language pragmatics has seen a surge of (revived) interest in recent years. It can be considered an appropriate meta-theory for Gricean pragmatics and related approaches. However, classical, which means rationalistic, game theory is based on notions like perfect rationality and common ground that have been criticized as psychologically unrealistic for language processing. A parallel discussion about the applicability of rationality assumptions in economics during the nineties has led to the adoption of evolutionary game theory (EGT) in economic research. Under this interpretation of GT, quasi-rational behaviour is derived as a consequence of a fully mechanistic adaptation process.

Our own previous research has shown that EGT can be applied quite successfully to linguistic problems. A central foundational issue has been left unresolved so far, however. EGT models are macroscopic descriptions of adaptation processes that, at the micro-level, involve some mechanism of replication (in the sense of copying) – analogously to reproduction via DNA replication in biology. There is good evidence that alignment, including self-alignment, is a central replication mechanism in this respect. This hypothesis will be explored in depth in the project. The goal is to make a connection between low-level alignment phenomena (studied via corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experiments) and high-level grammatical phenomena (studied via traditional linguistic analysis), using EGT-based modelling and computer simulations as the link between the two domains.