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During communication, the interpretation of utterances is sensitive to alistener's probabilistic prior beliefs, something which is captured by onecurrently influential model of pragmatics, the Rational Speech Act (RSA)framework. In this paper we focus on cases when this sensitivity to priorsleads to counterintuitive predictions of the framework. Our domain of interestis exhaustivity effects, whereby a sentence such as "Mary came" is understoodto mean that only Mary came. We show that in the baseline RSA model, undercertain conditions, anti-exhaustive readings are predicted (e.g., "Mary came"would be used to convey that both Mary and Peter came). The specific questionwe ask is the following: should exhaustive interpretations be derived as purelypragmatic inferences (as in the classical Gricean view, endorsed in thebaseline RSA model), or should they rather be generated by an encapsulatedsemantic mechanism (as argued in some of the recent formal literature)? Toanswer this question, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis of differentRSA models and evaluate them against data obtained in a new study which testedthe effects of prior beliefs on both production and comprehension, improving onprevious empirical work. We found no anti-exhaustivity effects, but observedthat message choice is sensitive to priors, as predicted by the RSA frameworkoverall. The best models turn out to be those which include an encapsulatedexhaustivity mechanism (as other studies concluded on the basis of verydifferent data). We conclude that, on the one hand, in the division of laborbetween semantics and pragmatics, semantics plays a larger role than is oftenthought, but, on the other hand, the tradeoff between informativity and costwhich characterizes all RSA models does play a central role for genuinepragmatic effects.

Exhaustivity and anti-exhaustivity in the RSA framework: Testing the effect of prior beliefs