Conversational Implicatures Applied In College English

Since it was introduced to China, pragmatics has attracted a number of Chinese linguists to gather around. Accordingly, books and researches about pragmatics have crowded into the linguistic circle. However, most of them stop proceeding at the level of theoretical study. As for how the theories can be applied to practice, few systematic researches have been carried out so far. The present study acts as a trial in this area.As a branch of the pragmatics theory, Grice's theory of conversational implicature was studied in this thesis in terms of its manifestation in College English skills: listening, speaking, reading, translation and writing. The way in which discourse markers affect the in-text conversational implicatures in building coherence was analyzed. Students' compositions were collected and processed in the SPSS. Results indicated that for most non-English major college students, more use of high-quality discourse markers could help improve the coherence of their compositions. It was also discovered that for those who usually use very few discourse markers, there is no correlation between the use of discourse markers and the coherence of the composition. For those who usually use too many discourse markers, however, there tended to be a negative correlation. In conclusion, for most cases in college English writing, coherence to be achieved through in-text conversational implicatures should resort to the sufficient and appropriate use of discourse markers.