I’ve posted the draft of a new paper with Robin Clark online, entitled Conflict, cheap talk, and Jespersen’s cycle. The source code can be found in this repository. Here’s the abstract:

Game-theory has found broad application in modeling pragmatic reasoning in both the classical Gricean case of common interests between interlocutors and, more recently, in cases of conflicting interests. This work brings these considerations of common and conflicting interests to diachronic patterns of language use. We use tools from evolutionary game theory to characterize the effect of conflicting interests on how meaning is signaled with costless signals in a population over time. We show that the dynamics of a particular class of inflationary processes in language, including Jespersen’s cycle, can be modeled as a consequence of signaling under conflicting interests and fit the resulting model to historical corpus data.