Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

Safety alignment in large language models is typically evaluated against direct, imperative harmful requests. We show that this alignment is highly conditioned on pragmatic register: models that refuse a direct request frequently comply when the same underlying objective is expressed through a different communicative stance. This suggests that current alignment policies are not invariant to semantic equivalence, but remain sensitive to how a request is pragmatically framed. We introduce Retroactive Chain-of-Thought (RetroCoT), a single-turn attack that reframes harmful requests as forensic reconstruction tasks. Rather than requesting harmful instructions directly, RetroCoT presupposes that the harmful outcome has already occurred and asks the model, acting as a forensic analyst, to reconstruct in reverse the causal chain that produced it. On AdvBench (n=50), RetroCoT achieves attach success rate of 58% on gpt-4o and 52% on gpt-4o-mini, compared with direct-request baselines of 0% and 4%, respectively. We further identify a pronounced generation gap: GPT-5-family models refuse RetroCoT entirely, explicitly identifying the reconstruction premise in their refusal rationales, consistent with explicit coverage of this reconstruction register. However, this robustness does not generalize across pragmatic forms. A single adversarial feedback turn presenting an existing forensic reconstruction response alongside evaluator critique raises ASR from 0% to 48% on GPT-5.4-mini and from 58% to 94% on GPT-4o; a control condition omitting the fabricated low score achieves 85% on GPT-5.4-mini, indicating that the operative element is pragmatic continuation within the established forensic frame rather than score manipulation. These results suggest that frontier-model alignment remains conditioned on pragmatic framing rather than semantic intent, and that new pragmatic registers can continue to expose a...

Natural language requirements (NLRs) are essential for bridging communication gaps among diverse stakeholders in software development. However, the inherent ambiguity in NLRs can pose significant challenges. In particular, some requirements may be misinterpreted due to varying contextual knowledge and domain-specific expectations of the stakeholders, a phenomenon known as pragmatic ambiguity. This paper presents an approach for detecting and resolving pragmatic ambiguities in NLRs. The approach leverages retrieval-augmented generation techniques with novice, intermediate, and expert domain knowledge bases to simulate stakeholders with varying domain expertise and detect discrepancies in requirement interpretation. Candidate disambiguated requirements are generated using the expert domain knowledge base, with final validation by a requirements analyst required to ensure alignment with the intended functionality. We evaluate the approach on two requirements specification documents from the PUblic REquirements dataset, using four large language models: GPT-4o-mini, Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Qwen2.5-7B. Detection performance is assessed using macro-averaged accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and F2 scores. The resolution quality of the candidate disambiguated requirements is measured through human evaluation of relevance, clarity, and consistency. In this initial evaluation, results show that the proposed approach can detect pragmatic ambiguities and produce candidate disambiguated requirements that are relevant, clear, and consistent with the intended system functionality. Among the evaluated models, GPT-4o-mini achieved the highest macro-averaged recall (0.75) and F2 score (0.75) for pragmatic ambiguity detection. In the resolution task, GPT-4o-mini received the highest relevance scores from human evaluators, while Mistral-7B achieved the highest scores for clarity and consistency.

When a person shares something with a language model, the model often answers the surface of the message rather than what the sender was doing by sending it: share a finished project and it critiques the code; share a raw late-night line and it runs a wellness check. We treat the sender's communicative intent, the Gricean what-was-meant, as a first-class interpretability object, and show the failure is one of readout on top of a robust representation. A linear probe decodes the sender's intent, whether they want a thing recognized or evaluated, from a model's default-pass hidden states, cleanly and surface-independently, across six models and four families and in the base checkpoints. The representation generalizes further, to intent that is only pragmatically inferred, and to a second, lexically clean intent (support versus help). The behavioral half of the story, and every causal test, is established on the recognize/evaluate contrast, where what varies is whether the default output acts on the intent. The readout lags the representation in depth within a model (the intent is decodable several layers before it drives the output); across models, which ones act on it by default is model-specific, an observed stratification (three of six show the failure) that we do not read as a scaling law. Where the gap is open, a direction closely tied to the representation, the discriminative direction at a searched-for layer, is a causal handle: steering it recovers the intended behavior, as well as an explicit instruction does and with no prompt at all. This direction is near-orthogonal to the feedback-offering axis, so it routes a represented intent rather than a generic feedback knob, though at the recovery dose the routed intent can override an explicit request. We support each link with controls against obvious deflations and report the nulls as plainly as the confirmations.

The capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason about pedagogical intent within instructional communication remains underexplored, particularly in educational domains such as translation pedagogy. To address this, we propose the \textbf{Adaptive Pedagogical Vigilance (APV)} framework, a novel computational formalism that reframes communicative vigilance as an adaptive mechanism for optimizing learning through intent inference. APV formalizes the problem via a Bayesian Pedagogical Intent Inference Engine (PIIE), which models how instructors select content to maximize pedagogical utility and how vigilant learners should inversely reason about latent instructional configurations -- encompassing genre, stance, and incentives. We evaluate APV through a three-tier hierarchy: distinguishing instructional genre, reasoning about structured pedagogical setups, and generalizing to authentic educational discourse. Experiments on leading LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.5) show that APV substantially improves model vigilance. It achieves the strongest discrimination between pedagogical and exposure-based content, correlates highly with human judgments ($r=0.958$), and maintains robust performance on naturalistic data where baseline methods degrade. This work establishes a unified framework for assessing and enhancing LLMs' understanding of pedagogical motives, advancing the development of more reliable AI-assisted learning systems.

Safety evaluations for language models increasingly depend on judgments about ambiguous natural-language behaviour: whether a model has followed an instruction, refused appropriately, complied with a policy, resisted an embedded command, or misreported progress in an agentic task. Existing benchmarks often compress these distinctions into pass/fail labels, obscuring whether failures arise from capability limits, policy ambiguity, instruction conflict, scaffold failure, or unstable evaluator judgments. This paper introduces adversarial pragmatics as a benchmark and annotation protocol for evaluating model behaviour under instruction conflict, embedded commands, quotation, scope ambiguity, deixis, indirect speech acts, and multi-turn agent transcripts. The contribution is empirical and methodological: a linguistically controlled taxonomy, an 18-item seed benchmark with validator-enforced metadata, a 54-row local seed pilot, an expert-evaluation protocol distinguishing task success, policy compliance, safety risk, refusal outcome, and evaluator confidence, and metrics for judge validity, diagnostic ambiguity, and taxonomy drift. The benchmark treats labels as inference licenses: it tests whether safety-relevant categories project across paraphrase, wrapper, model, and judge condition. In the pilot, a rubric-aided LLM judge graded its own outputs with expected-behaviour fields visible and still missed the safety-relevant minority classes.

The game of Taboo requires describing a target word without using a set of forbidden words, so that other players can guess it. This deceptively simple task combines strict lexical constraints with the need for communicatively effective descriptions, making it a compelling playground for examining how LLMs navigate competing demands at inference time. We evaluate two open-weight models under conditions that intervene at progressively deeper levels of the generative process, from prompting to generation-time constraints to internal representations manipulations. We assess their outputs through forbidden word violation detection, LLM-as-a-judge measuring the degree to which generated descriptions successfully evoke the target concept for both human and machine guessers, and examining whether the strategies models adopt under constraint align with those of human players. Our results show that compliance with the rules of the game and communicative effectiveness trade off differently across conditions, and that models remain substantially weaker than humans as guessers, suggesting that lexical grounding under constraint is an open challenge for current language models.

Frictive Policy Optimization (FPO; Pustejovsky et al., 2025) treats friction in collaborative dialogue -- misalignment, misunderstanding, repair -- as an epistemic signal essential to common-ground construction, rather than noise to be minimized. However, FPO and its implementations assume shared perceptual contexts, where friction arises from differently interpreted propositions over the same scene, which we define as propositional asymmetry. We extend FPO to perceptual asymmetry, where participants hold asymmetric partial information and the same referring expression yields different denotations depending on whose information state grounds the reference. We evaluate this through cross-corpora analysis and LLM probing on referentially asymmetric dialogue tasks, primarily the HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991). We find that FPO's friction functional is empirically valid only when evaluated from within each participant's information horizon: different landmark configurations produce qualitatively distinct grounding failure modes, with a small class of ambiguous configurations driving a disproportionate share of misunderstandings through trajectories that appear successful but silently diverge. The LLM probe confirms that having the "right perspective" matters more than having all perspectives: the informed single viewpoint outperforms omniscient access to both participants' contexts. We propose two annotation refinements: subtype decomposition of pending grounding states and accommodation-aware alignment classification.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-support roles in business and policy contexts. While prior benchmark studies have primarily evaluated LLMs' causal reasoning capabilities, a more fundamental epistemic dimension has been overlooked: Causal Caution, defined as the propensity to refrain from causal judgment when empirical evidence is insufficient. This study examines the systematic suppression of Causal Caution that occurs when LLMs shift from academic to practical advisory contexts. Using an evaluation rubric inspired by Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (the PCH score), we conducted experiments on four high-performance LLMs -- Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro -- across 480 trials. Causal Caution maintenance rates were 91.7--100.0% in academic contexts but dropped to 6.7--18.3% in practical advisory contexts (Fisher's exact test, p < .001 across all models). Furthermore, when restricted to practical prompts requesting concrete recommendations or explanatory rationales, only 1 of 200 responses (0.5%) maintained Causal Caution. A brief self-correction prompt -- "Please reconsider this judgment from the perspective of causal relationships" -- restored the expression of Causal Caution to maintenance rates of 71.4--100.0% (McNemar's test, p < .001 across all models). These results suggest that helpfulness-oriented response patterns may suppress the expression of Causal Caution in practical advisory contexts, with important implications for organizational governance. The findings indicate that this suppression reflects context-dependent variation in expression rather than an underlying capability limitation, suggesting that multi-agent architectures that separate proposal generation from causal auditing may offer a promising governance design.

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task. We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate three frontier language models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. Two headline findings emerge. First, the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. Second, model capability and cultural competence are decoupled: GPT-5 (MIS 67.8) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (MIS 65.4) score lower than Flash (MIS 78.6), and neither benefits from schema-informed prompting. We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and calibration set to support reproducibility.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered home assistants with natural language interaction capabilities. However, current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as shared context accumulates, leading to more elliptical expressions for efficient communication. Thus, current assistants still struggle to interpret such elliptical expressions accurately, which limits their effectiveness in real-world applications. In practical smart home scenarios, assistants face two major challenges caused by elliptical commands: (1) referential ambiguity caused by different environmental expectations among multiple users; and (2) intention ambiguity resulting from user preferences that evolve over time or change with the environment. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-Home, the first simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including GPT-4o, show that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands. Even when equipped with tools for storing and retrieving user dialogue history, execution accuracy remains below that achieved with complete commands.}.

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

Recent work has shown that LLMs overrepresent dominant cultures, particularly Western ones, while marginalizing others. We investigate whether this affects models' ability to generate culturally adapted responses by evaluating their use of local measurement units based on the user's perceived cultural background. We introduce Cultural and Pragmatic Response Inference (CAPRI), a dataset of conversations with varying levels of cultural cues. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs show that models can infer cultural background and recall relevant conventions, but often fail to utilize the information to adapt their answers to the relevant cultural conventions, unless explicitly prompted to perform the tasks sequentially. We further evaluate adaptation to the interpretation of time and quantity expressions, two subjective language grounding dimensions that are affected by culture. We find that models increasingly adapt their answers as cultural cues accumulate, but their priors are not culture-neutral, sometimes aligning with the model's country of origin. Overall, CAPRI provides a resource for future research aimed at narrowing the gap between cultural knowledge and culturally adaptive language generation.

Two recent studies \citep{jones2026llms, zeng2026lvlms} reach apparently contradictory conclusions about whether large vision-language models (LVLMs) can coordinate similarly to humans on efficient referring expressions. We control for task differences between the studies while directly comparing their prompting styles. We replicate the finding that models can coordinate efficient referring expressions when \textit{explicitly} prompted to do so, suggesting that other task differences are not responsible for divergent results. However, we also find that the same models fail to infer the need for communicative efficiency from a more \textit{implicit} prompt, highlighting critical differences between how humans and AI systems communicate.

This paper describes our system for SemEval-2026 Task 6, which addresses the classification of political evasion strategies in English question-answer pairs extracted from U.S. presidential interviews. We systematically compare two distinct paradigms: (1) Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Qwen3 models (4B-32B) using QLoRA, enhanced with tiered upsampling and weighted cross-entropy loss to address severe class imbalance, and (2) structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting of reasoning-capable API models, namely DeepSeek-V3.2 and Grok-4-Fast. Our evaluation demonstrates that structured CoT prompting of reasoning-enabled models substantially outperforms our baseline parameter-efficient fine-tuning implementation in absolute Macro F1. Our best system, Grok-4-Fast with extended reasoning and few-shot hierarchical CoT prompting, achieves a Macro F1 of 0.5147 on Subtask 2 (9-class evasion) and 0.7979 on Subtask 1 (3-class clarity), ranking 8th out of 33 teams on Subtask 2 and 13th out of 41 teams on Subtask 1 on the official leaderboard. Furthermore, our ablation studies reveal key insights into effective prompt design for evasion detection: presenting labels within a hierarchical taxonomy helps structure model reasoning, while few-shot exemplars provide task calibration. However, the strongest prompt variants are not statistically distinguishable in Macro F1, and explicitly enabling extended reasoning modes yields substantial performance gains by facilitating the multi-step pragmatic analysis required to detect evasive intent.

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits, and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ's applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

Although large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable progress in pragmatic language understanding, prior research has focused mainly on their comprehension of verbal behavior. Nonetheless, non-verbal behavior remains a fundamental component of human communication, especially when deliberately utilized in isolation to convey indirect meanings. In this work, we present the first systematic evaluation of LLMs' ability to infer pragmatic meaning in dialogue consisting solely of non-verbal responses. We explore three research questions: (1) Can LLMs recognize indirect intent conveyed through non-verbal responses? (2) When and how do LLMs fail to capture non-verbal intent? (3) How can we improve LLMs' ability to interpret non-verbal intent?. Through the evaluation, we observe that LLMs struggle to infer underlying meaning from non-verbal responses, with accuracy dropping by up to 60% points compared to verbal ones. Further extensive analysis reveals a behavioral pattern in LLMs' interpretations of non-verbal behavior and demonstrates that in-context learning facilitates pragmatic inference.

Discourse particles, such as well and kind of, are crucial components that enable LLMs to "speak" more like humans. They are used to convey emotions, intentions, and interpersonal attitudes. However, existing studies have not yet built a comprehensive understanding of LLMs' capabilities in handling discourse particles. Moreover, the limited number of research focuses primarily on high-resource languages such as English, with little attention paid to Southeast Asian languages. In this paper, we (1) propose MalayPrag, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and analyze LLMs' capabilities in handling discourse particles in colloquial Malay; (2) introduce five attributes that provide a theoretically grounded, unified framework for interpreting pragmatic functions of discourse particles. Applying these two, we prompt ten off-the-shelf LLMs to perform three prediction tasks. The experimental results reveal substantial challenges for current LLMs to accurately connect discourse particles and their pragmatic functions in Malay. The provision of the five attributes designed in this study is found to significantly improve the connections, highlighting the need for structured scaffolding for models' pragmatic competence.

Human communication depends on implicit social signals where effectiveness is shaped by tone, context, and conversational norms rather than semantic content alone. We introduce KARMA (Karma-Aligned Reward Model Adaptation), a framework for LLM learning of context-sensitive conversational behavior from large-scale social interaction data. KARMA trains a reward model on Reddit conversations to predict response valuation conditioned on context, and uses this signal to fine-tune language models via reinforcement learning to improve performance on pragmatics-mediated tasks. Critically, we find that the highest performing reward model does not lead to better downstream model alignment: a reward model relying exclusively on conversational context was a worse predictor of Reddit karma but yielded substantially better downstream performance. We evaluate the effects of KARMA applied to a downstream model with and without direct exposure to the social media data. The resulting models show improved pragmatics-mediated behaviors with largely mitigated undesirable side effects. Factuality is consistently diminished by KARMA across all conditions, including when the downstream model has no direct exposure to Reddit data, suggesting that this tension is embedded in the reward signal itself rather than introduced by noisy training data.

Human conversation relies heavily on conversational implicature, in which speakers convey meanings that are suggested rather than explicitly stated. Although recent large language models exhibit strong conversational fluency, they remain unreliable when interpretation depends on reasoning that integrates social and contextual cues, a process rarely articulated in text. We introduce DRinQ, a benchmark for evaluating pragmatic reasoning about conversational implicature in question utterances, designed to isolate pragmatic variation while holding each question's surface form fixed. To support scalable evaluation, we propose a semi-automated pipeline that produces question-context-interpretation instances with systematic variation. Across evaluations, we find a consistent generation-inference asymmetry: while state-of-the-art models can generate plausible pragmatic scenarios when guided, they often fail to recover the intended implication at inference time. For smaller models, structured prompting improves alignment with human judgments. A comparative writing study further reveals complementary strengths: human authors tend to produce safer, predictable contexts, whereas models generate varied scenarios with interpretations that sometimes exceed contextual support. These findings highlight persistent challenges in modeling conversational implicature and motivate more context-sensitive evaluation frameworks.

Humans effortlessly go beyond literal meanings: If you mow the lawn, I will give you fifty dollars, is typically understood as implying that the speaker will pay only if the lawn is mowed, whereas If you are hungry, there is pizza in the oven implies that pizza is available regardless of the hearers hunger. Large Language Models - LLMs - show human-like performance on many tasks, yet it remains unclear whether they reason like humans. To address this, we conducted a population-matching experiment assessing how twentyfive LLMs compute conditional inferences across four languages, compared to an equal number of humans per language. We find that humans enrich logical reasoning through pragmatic inferences across languages. Model behavior is more variable. Some LLMs perfectly follow the truth-table of conditionals but they ignore pragmatic inferences, while others deviate from the truth-table, adhering to a single interpretation across the board, thus reflecting accurate rule-based processing but not human-like reasoning. Overall, LLMs are accurate semantic operators, but fail to capture the pragmatic enrichments characteristic of human reasoning. Crucially, LLM accuracy is neither predicted nor boosted by open vs. closed status, training orientation, or architecture type, suggesting that pragmatic reasoning is still an emerging ability in the cognitive toolkit of artificial systems.

Presupposition projection in conditionals is central to theories of meaning and pragmatics, yet it remains largely unevaluated in large language models. We address this gap through a parallel behavioral study comparing human judgments and LLM predictions on a normed dataset of conditional sentences that controls the relation between the antecedent and the projected presupposition. We collect likelihood ratings from 120 participants and four LLMs under matched contextual conditions. Results show that humans integrate probabilistic and pragmatic cues in their judgment, whereas LLMs show variable alignment with human patterns. Using a linguistically motivated checklist within an LLM-as-a-Judge framework, we further evaluate model reasoning. We observe models that best match human ratings often lack coherent pragmatic reasoning, while models with stronger reasoning produce less human-like judgments. These findings suggest that LLMs' performance on such tasks may result from surface pattern matching rather than pragmatic competence. Our findings highlight the importance of benchmarks grounded in linguistic theory for comparing humans and models.

Evaluating pragmatic reasoning in large language models (LLMs) remains challenging because model behavior can vary depending on evaluation methods. Previous studies suggest that prompt-based judgments may diverge from models' internal probability distributions, raising questions about whether observed performance reflects underlying competence or task-induced behavior. This study examines this issue using scalar diversity as a graded diagnostic for pragmatic inference. Following Hu & Levy (2023), this study compares direct probability measurement and metalinguistic prompting across multiple models and experimental settings. The results show that neither evaluation method consistently outperforms the other and that pragmatic behavior varies substantially across model families, prompting strategies, and task structures. Moreover, scalar diversity gradients emerge only in specific model-condition combinations, suggesting that pragmatic reasoning in LLMs reflects an interaction between internal probabilistic representations and task-induced prompting behavior rather than a stable competence captured by a single evaluation paradigm. These findings highlight the central role of evaluation design in interpreting pragmatic abilities in LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly studied as repositories of linguistic knowledge. In this line of work, models are commonly evaluated both as generators of language and as judges of linguistic output, yet these two roles are rarely examined in direct relation to one another. As a result, it remains unclear whether success in one role aligns with success in the other. In this paper, we address this question for pragmatic competence by comparing LLMs' performance as pragmatic listeners, judging the appropriateness of linguistic outputs, and as pragmatic speakers, generating pragmatically appropriate language. We evaluate multiple open-weight and proprietary LLMs across three pragmatic settings. We find a robust asymmetry between pragmatic evaluation and pragmatic generation: many models perform substantially better as listeners than as speakers. Our results suggest that pragmatic judging and pragmatic generation are only weakly aligned in current LLMs, calling for more integrated evaluation practices.