Griceu27s Cooperative Principle at work in an ESL classroom : a case for teaching implicature

摘要

With little conscious awareness of it, native speakers of English are engaged daily in the comprehension and production of speakersu27implied meaning, or conversational implicature. Despite its ubiquity in daily life, however, the teaching of implied meaning appears to receive scant attention in ESL/EFL classrooms. Several factors argue for its inclusion. First, interlanguage pragmatics, to which Gricean pragmatics is related, assumes the explicit instruction to ESL/EFL learners of contextually-relevant pragmatic aspects of language use. Second, studies of ESL learnersu27awareness and production of implicature carried out by Bouton (1988, 1990, 1992, 1994b) produced evidence that argues for the explicit instruction of implicature in particular. Third, the data analyzed in the investigation reported in this paper yields further evidence supporting Boutonu27s argument. In this paper, Griceu27s Cooperative Principle (CP) is applied to a sample of non-native speaker interaction as a tool for discourse analysis. The findings of the CP analysis attendant to Boutonu27s findings indicate the usefulness and advisability of teaching implicature in ESL classrooms. Thus, a proposal is offered for a study consisting of three aims: search for existing instances of implicature production in a class of ESL learners, attempt to raise learnersu27awareness of implicature, and instruct learners in the production of implicature.