Abstract
Speech Acts, as introduced by J.L. Austin have long been the study of philosophers and linguists alike. The speech act is a term created to explain those utterances that are not descriptive in nature, but rather serve to perform an action. Once these types of utterances started to be analyzed, it quickly came to light that there are many types of such utterances. This gave rise to the study of indirect speech acts (Searle, 1975 and Grice, 1975). Not only is their form varied, but so is their function and interpretation. \r The aim of this thesis is to create a unified model of conversation, including motivation for and interpretation of indirect requests. I will apply game-theoretic methods to tie utterances together into a language game.\r Publicly available corpora were analyzed to determine the form and function of indirect speech acts. Building on theories of politeness as the motivation for indirect speech acts, conversation is modeled as a language game (Brown and Levinson, 1987 and Stalnaker 1974). Utterances in this model are treated as moves in a conversational scoreboard (Lewis, 1979), using a preference heirarchy (CP-nets, Boutilier, 2004) as utilities.\r Utterances made correspond to moves in an elaborate game. Every utterance, direct and indirect speech acts alike, has its own place on this scoreboard and its own price.