Learners’ Strategy Use in Formulaic-based Implicatures

Table 4.7 displays the distribution of learners’ strategy use in Formulaic-based implicatures.

Table 4.7 Learners’ Strategy Use in Formulaic-based Implicatures

PC APR B/E KI LR SI TT

IMPLIC

Type H L H L H L H L H L H L H L

Total

Pope Q 7 8 1 0 0 0 0 5 17 5 1 0 0 3 47

Irony 15 19 0 0 2 5 0 0 1 6 16 2 0 0 66

UC 2 2 19 9 3 6 0 1 2 0 3 1 0 0 48

Total 40 41 45 19 8 11 2 19 68 40 43 18 0 9 363 Note. H= high-proficiency learners; L= low-proficiency learners; PC= paralinguistic cues;

APR= adjacency pair rule; B/E= background knowledge/experience; KI= key word inferencing; LR=logical reasoning; SI=speaker intention; TT=testing tips. Numbers in bold type are highlighted to show learners’ strategy use pattern.

In the previous section (section 4.2), learners’ comprehension results showed that learners comprehended less well in Formulaic-based implicatures than in Relevance-based implicatures. Among the Formulaic-based implicatures, learners comprehended least well in Understated Criticism, a special type of implicature in which the speaker’s indirect criticism is encoded with a seeming compliment on a peripheral or an unimportant feature of something or someone being evaluated. Close examination on learners’ strategy use in Understated Criticism emerges an interesting

fact. Take item 13 for example. When the speaker was asked to comment on the food, he responded with It’s colorful, isn’t it? In the dialogue, the speaker neither responded with an unpleasant tone nor with a negative comment. Instead, the speaker made a compliment The food looks colorful. Since there were no apparent paralinguistic cues available to help learners interpret the implicature, they turned to employ adjacency pair rule. As can be seen in Table 4.7, both high-proficiency learners and

low-proficiency learners frequently employed adjacency pair rule as a clue to derive the intended meaning, as two of the learners responded,

(15) He did not directly say ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about the food, but only commented ‘colorful’. It is apparent that he was indirectly saying the food was not good. (H-learner 7)

(16) If he liked it, he could have directly said the food was good, but he didn’t. He only said that the food was colorful, which means he didn’t like it very much. (L-learner 51)

Note that high-proficiency learners employed two times as many adjacency pair rule as low-proficiency learners did (H: 19 incidences; L: 9 instances), which may probably explain why low-proficiency learners failed to comprehend Understated Criticism (with the success rate of 26.47% ). When low-proficiency learners failed to employ adjacency pair rule, some of the learners turned to their background knowledge or experience in

colorful food.

(17) Usually, food that is beautiful in appearance looks tastier. (L-learner 53) (18) I think the food tastes good because beautiful food usually increases the

appetite. (L-learner 43)

Another interesting point which deserves our attention is learners’ strategy use in Irony, which elicited most strategies (66 incidences) among the Formulaic-based implicatures. When learners interpreted Irony, high-proficiency learners and low-proficiency learners uniformly employed frequent paralinguistic cues, 15 and 19 instances respectively, as demonstrated in the following examples.

(19) This situation per se is quite illogical (how come my wife left with my good friend). In addition, Bill said “He really is my good friend”

and I can feel he particularly stressed the word “really”, which means

“How can you do this to my wife!” From his tone, apparently, he was not saying what he meant－it’s just a sarcasm. (H-learner 28)

(20) He said loudly “What! Peter is not my friend anymore”. He sounded very angry and it really made his blood boil. (L-learner 56)

Although previous research categorized Irony into difficult type of implicature (Bouton, 1999), the results of the present study did not support this claim. Descriptive statistics showed that learners were not found to comprehend less well in Irony (71.26% for high-proficiency learners and 48.27% for low-proficiency learners). In fact, learners’

success rate in Irony was close to that of Relevance-based implicature (71.27% for high-proficiency learners and 48.57% for low-proficiency learners). This finding could be explained by the fact that paralinguistic cues were accessible in Irony items to help learners interpret the implicature (See Table 4.7). In interpreting Irony, high-proficiency learners were also found to employ more upper-level inferential strategy－recognizing speaker intention for making the implicature. As shown in Table 4.7, 16 instances of speaker intention were employed by high-proficiency learners, which was eight times

as many as low-proficiency learners did. In the Inferential Strategy Questionnaires, high-proficiency learners were able to specify speaker intention behind the implicature,

such as “He was furious and he was just showing his sarcasm” (H-learner 4).

In summary, section 4.3 presents and compares the distribution of learners’

strategy use in implicature comprehension. Two generations can be derived from the above analysis. First, learners with different proficiency level were found to demonstrate different preferences for inferential strategy use. In general, high-proficiency learners employed more higher-level inferential strategies, such as adjacency pair rule, logical reasoning, and speaker intention. Low proficiency learners;

on the other hand, were found to employ more bottom-up strategies such as key word infenrencing and Testing Tips. This result is consistent with Taguchi’s (2002) findings,

in which he found that high-proficiency learners reported using more speaker intention, while low-proficiency learners reported using more key word inferencing and background knowledge/experience. This distinct strategy use not only demonstrated

learners’ preferences, it could also explain why learners comprehend less well in certain types of implicature. Closer examination on learners’ strategy use in difficult types of implicatures (Relevance-evaluation, Relevance-change, and Understated Criticism) suggested that when encountering difficult types of implicature, high-proficiency learners still held onto the adjacency pair rule principle and sought genuine speaker intention for the mismatch between what was said and what was meant. Low proficiency learners; however, when they encountered difficult types of implicature, they tended to search for the relevance at the surface level by either relating a key word to the possible interpretation (i.e., key word inferencing and Testing Tips), or by turning to their background knowledge/experience to justify the validity of the literal interpretation they chose. These results lent support to Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) claim that utterance interpretation is a relevance-seeking behavior, an “individual behavior”, in which the individual’s “preferences” and “abilities” shape the ways of

Second, it was found that the difficulty of the implicature per se was not the only factor resulting in learners’ misinterpretation. The accessibility of the contextual information also played an essential role in implicature comprehension. As discussed earlier, Irony, being categorized as a difficult implicature type in the previous literature (Bouton, 1999), was not found difficult at all for the learners to comprehend. In fact, descriptive statistics showed that learners’ success rate of Irony was close to that of Relevance-based implicatures (See Figure 4.1). This contradiction may be attributed to the fact that Irony items in the present study were accompanied with rich paralinguistic cues and familiar contexts, which had complemented learners’ inadequate interpretation skill and facilitated their comprehension. Similar finding was also observed by Gibbs (1994), in which he found that English native speakers could understand nonliteral utterance as quickly as, sometime even more quickly as literal uses of the same utterance in different contexts, provided that these expressions appeared in realistic social context. For instance, people could capture the ironic meaning of the utterance You’re a fine friend (meaning You’re a bad friend) immediately without additional cognitive effort. The easiness of people processing ironic remark is because people are often familiar with many ironic situations, and when they encounter similar contexts, they can understand the ironic remark without resorting to additional computation (Gibbs, 1994; Lucariello, 1994). Consistent with Gibb’s (1994) findings, the ironic remark in the present study That Peter knows how to really be good friend, doesn’t he?

was easily captured by the learners through the speaker’s ironic tone as well as the familiar ironic context (i.e., His wife had affairs with his good friend). As can bee seen in Table 4.7, learners employed frequent paralinguistic cues and speaker intention to help them derive the ironic meaning. These results once again suggested that if contextual information is accessible, L2 learners can even comprehend difficult types of implicature without additional cognitive effort.