Comprehension of Conversational Implicatures by Students of the ELT Department

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which Turkish ELT student teachers comprehend conversational implicatures concerning Grice's theory of co-operative principle (1989). The act of communication speech acts can be either direct or indirect. In the case of indirect speech acts, an addressee has to comprehend the addresser's meaning, which means comprehending the implicature. Implicature is the meaning of the speaker's utterance that is not part of what the speaker says. The inference of the meaning in an utterance by participants mostly depends on the contextual clues in a particular situation. The listener has to differentiate between the literal (semantic) meaning and non-literal (pragmatic) meaning. Developing ELT students' pragmatic competence is significant for successful communication in the target language. Although there is much research into EFL pragmatic competence focusing on conversational implicatures, in the Northern Cypriot ELT context there is still a need to examine the issue. This study was designed to investigate the extent to which prospective teachers of English comprehend conversational implications.