Failures, exploitations and deceits in communication

In this paper we sketch the general lines of a model of an elementary interchange in a dialogue, and concentrate on the analysis of the dialogue failures and exploitations the model can account for, as well as on deceitful uses of communication and non-expressive uses of language. We show that our model of standard communication can explain non-standard uses of language without special adaptation. In this way we can account for a variety of linguistic phenomena which are often neglected in formal treatments of dialogue, and provide a first validation of the knowledge structures and inference processes assumed in the model.