Applying The Theory Of Conversational Implicature To Improve The Communicative Competence

Whether the traditional linguistics, structuralist linguistics or transformational-generative linguistics all thought linguistics studied only language itself. Chomsky made a distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. He thought the object of language study was linguistic competence while grammar was the description of linguistic competence. It did not do research on linguistic performance. Therefore, his contribution is confined to syntax. After this, many linguists focused its study on semantics. But they noticed many language appearances could be explained neither by syntax nor by semantics. So they began to extend pragmatic analysis to language.Pragmatics is a newly arising discipline and it does research on the language use as a whole. It reflects the relations between discourse and context. Many sentences can only be interpreted from the context. The main findings of pragmatics include Grace's Cooperative Principle, Searle's Indirect Speech Act Theory and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Principle. These theories have the same function as Hymes's Communicative Competence. Communicative competence is part of pragmatic study. It includes not only language knowledge (vocabulary, grammar), but also the knowledge of context and social cultural knowledge. This shows pragmatic competence is one component part of communicative competence.To communicate successfully, it is not nearly enough for students to master language knowledge. They also need pragmatic competence to a certain extent. But for a long time, under the influence of traditional linguistics, English teaching puts excessive emphasis on language knowledge while neglects pragmatic competence. And thereby it influenced the students' communicative competence. To solve this problem, the author thinks teachers of English should combine the pragmatic theory such as "conversational implicature" "speech act theory" "context" with the teaching of communication. The teaching of communication is supposed to concern the factors which affect the understanding of the conversational implicature and endeavor to...