Language is often used strategically, particularly in high-stakes, adversarial settings, yet most work on pragmatics and LLMs centers on cooperative settings. This leaves a gap in the systematic understanding of strategic communication in adversarial settings. To address this, we introduce SDA (Strategic Dialogue Assessment), a framework grounded in Gricean and game-theoretic pragmatics to assess strategic use of language. It adapts the ME Game jury function to make it empirically estimable for analyzing dialogue. Our approach incorporates two key adaptations: a commitment-based taxonomy of discourse moves, which provides a finer-grained account of strategic effects, and the use of estimable proxies grounded in Gricean maxims to operationalize abstract constructs such as credibility. Together, these adaptations build on discourse theory by treating discourse as the strategic management of commitments, enabling systematic evaluation of how conversational moves advance or undermine discourse goals. We further derive three interpretable metrics - Benefit at Turn (BAT), Penalty at Turn (PAT), and Normalized Relative Benefit at Turn (NRBAT) - to quantify the perceived strategic effects of discourse moves. We also present CPD (the Crooked Path Dataset), an annotated dataset of real courtroom cross-examinations, to demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness. Using these tools, we evaluate a range of LLMs and show that LLMs generally exhibit limited pragmatic understanding of strategic language. While model size shows an increase in performance on our metrics, reasoning ability does not help and largely hurts, introducing overcomplication and internal confusion.

Recency affects how accessible referents are, but the effect of recency is mediated by the structure of the discourse. In a series of four pronoun resolution experiments, we examine how the accessibility of referents is impacted by the form of subsequent discourse segments, investigating effects of syntactic subordination, the presence of explicit coherence markers, and typographic and prosodic boundaries. Our findings indicate that syntactic subordination, connectives, and typographic boundaries all additively contribute to whether an intervening clause is perceived as less or more conceptually integrated, and that this affects how strongly that clause blocks access to a preceding referent. However, the type of prosodic boundary was found to interact with syntax in an unforeseen way: only with syntactic subordination did a high boundary seem to increase the perception of the intervening clause as integrated, but not with coordination. Our results speak to the question of how the mental representation of a discourse is affected by the specific form of the discourse, and call for a reconsideration of intonational boundaries as integratedness cues.

In this paper, we investigate the factors that influence interactants’ choice of syntactic variants when using a predicative adjective construction like that is okay. In German colloquial conversation, such constructions can occur as full sentences with subject, copula and adjective (das ist gut ‘that is good’); with topic drop consisting of copula and adjective (ist gut); or as fragments consisting only of the adjective (gut). We present findings from a corpus of colloquial speech between fellow students showing that the interactional function of listener feedback has a higher predictive power in accounting for the use of fragments vs. fuller structures than adjective semantics (descriptive vs. evaluative), propositional structure (reference to individual or propositionally structured referent), and predictability in terms of adjective frequency. Moreover, we find that fragments consisting of evaluative adjectives show a clear tendency to be grounded in the here-and-now of the current situation, whereas fuller structures are more apt to express evaluations grounded in past experience. We argue that fragments are formally optimized to convey expressive actions such as listener feedback and other ad-hoc evaluations.