The Acquisition Of Scalar Implicature

The concept of "scalar" was firstly introduced by Horn in 1972, but the concept of "Scalar Implicature" (SI) was not completely formulated until 1987 when Levinson provided a further explanation based on Grice’s "Conversational Implicature" (CI) theory. In the following decades, SI has drawn attention from linguists and psychologists at home and abroad, and numerous studies have been carried out to explain the computation and suspension of SI, as well as the acquisition of SI. There have been a considerable number of studies devoted to the acquisition of SI, especially in the first language, making tremendous contributions to the explanations of language learners’SI computation process.Although certain achievements have been made based on the previous studies, the exploration of SI still requires further improvements. First of all, there are two different accounts of the computation of SI:"Default account" and "Context-driven account". The first account claims the use of SI items can automatically trigger SI, while the other account lays more emphasis on the importance of context. More work needs to be done in order to verify different assumptions in these two accounts. Secondly, previous researches have proved preschool children generally fail to interpret scalar items pragmatically, but the explanations for the failure still leave more space for further clarification. Thirdly, most of the previous studies focus on the first language acquisition, while only a few ones have ever touched upon the second language acquisition. Considering the universal feature of language in use, we suggest more studies should be conducted to unveil the similarities and differences between the first and second languages, as well as to see whether the pragmatic transfer happens during the acquisition. Lastly, the number of acquisition studies at home is comparatively small. The characteristics of Chinese children’s acquisition of SI remain unclear. To sum up, more investigations should be carried out to explore the computation and acquisition of SI in details.Based on previous studies, the thesis is designed to observe the semantic and pragmatic acquisition of the Chinese modal verb keneng and the English modal may among Chinese children and adults, so as to find out the similarities and differences between children and adults’language in use, as well as the first and second language acquisition. Our study employs Truth Value Judgment Task and Felicity Judgment Tasks in the form of sentence-picture verification.15 children at the age of 5 to 6,15 children at the age of 7 to 8 and 15 children at the age of 9 to 10, as well as 13 Mandarin-speaking adults took part in the Chinese research; while 30 junior high students (including students in Grade One and Grade Two),12 graduate students majoring in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, and 12 English native speakers participated in the English research. After the experiments, valid data were analyzed by the software of SPSS Statistics 17.0.Several findings are achieved:first of all, Chinese children begin to have access to the meaning of keneng by interpreting it semantically and their knowledge about its pragmatic interpretation comes late, roughly at the age of 7 to 8, which helps to verify the rationality of Default account; secondly, there is no direct relation between English learners’interpretation of English modal may and their English ability, but the acquisition of the meaning of modal may is useful to its pragmatic interpretation; thirdly, greater suspension of SI is observed in Chinese research, compared with that in English one, which may be caused by different language structures between Chinese and English; fourthly, negative forms of modality are explored in the present research, revealing that it is more difficult to acquire the modal structures when a modal verb is in the scope of a negator than that when a negator is in the scope of a modal verb; last but not least, linguistic environment plays an important role in the interpretation of SI, but different types of experimental tasks also lead to different experimental results.To sum up, the present study illustrates both children and adults’interpretation of Chinese modal keneng, as well as English learners and native speakers’interpretation of English modal may, revealing the similarities and differences between children and adults, as well as between English learners and native speakers. Meanwhile, the comparison between Chinese and English also provides an empirical support for the Universal Grammar, deepening our understanding of language development.