Relationship Between Grammatical Knowledge And Pragmatic Ability Of Chinese College English Learners: From The Perspective Of Epistemic Modality

The present study addresses a methodological issue in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, particularly in examining the relationship between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic ability through employing epistemic modality. Epistemic modality is a critical part of modality, which has attracted much attention from many research fields. Whether students can express this type of modal meaning appropriately is regarded as a decisive element of successful academic writing because of its unique pragmatic functions of weakening or strengthening the writers'statement.Early in last century, F. de Saussure proposed an important distinction between langue and parole, which is similar to Chomsky's linguistic competence and linguistic performance. After Chomsky, many linguists such as Bachman, Kasper and Kellerman did much research in studying the relationship between the two, especially in the field of interlanguage and L2 learning. However, it does not receive so much attention domestically as it does from abroad.By studying the relationship between the two, three tests are designed to assess college students'mastery of epistemic markers grammatically and practically. The results of the tests show that both of L2 learners'general and specific grammatical knowledge have a difference in predicting their specific pragmatic ability. Learners who did quite well in the general grammatical knowledge test may get a low mark in the specific pragmatic ability test, while those high markers in the specific grammatical knowledge test usually can do a good job in the corresponding specific pragmatic ability test. In addition, the total score of their specific pragmatic ability test was usually a little lower than that of the specific grammatical knowledge test, which indicates that their pragmatic ability is somewhat low when compared with their corresponding grammatical knowledge.On the basis of these findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions concerning the improvement of teaching methods and the inclusion of explicit and appropriate instructions of epistemic markers are involved. The organization of the dissertation is listed as follows:Chapter 1 provides a general introduction for the present study.Chapter 2 gives a detailed literature review on epistemic modality.Chapter 3 mainly contributes to the methodological issue, that is, the detailed information about the learner corpus and the reference corpus, the research tools and the research procedures.Chapter 4 reports the results and discusses them in an explorative way.Chapter 5 is the last part of the paper, in which Pedagogical implications and limitations of the present study are presented and the directions for future research are suggested as well.