A Study Of English Scalar Implicature Inference Model And Its Teaching Strategies In Junior High Schools

As an implied meaning embedded in the literal forms uttered,scalar implicature(SI)may be derived when the speaker’s utterance is less informative than the conversation requires,which has moved to the forefront of attention in post-Gricean pragmatics.When it comes to the processing model,there are two opposite hypotheses concerning how the scalar implicature is processed.Levinson argues in favor of default inference model,whereas relevance theory holds context-driven view.There have been substantial experiments in which a specific scalar term‘some’ is commonly involved overwhelmingly supporting context-driven model.On the contrary,there have been some studies focusing on the scalarity of the scalar words,which turns out that the processing mechanism underlying negatively scalar words is commonly consistent with defaultist view.However,these studies mainly focused on preschool children and adults while junior high school students received little attention.Moreover,despite the prerequisite for inferring the scalar implicature based on their mature pragmatic mechanisms and the need of enhancing pragmatic inferencing ability,there is a lack of adequate researches concerning specific teaching strategies on how to comprehend scalar implicature effectively for junior high school students based on their corresponding inference models.Therefore,this study is intended to explore the diversity within scalar words which are different in the scalarity so as to determine the inference model of scalar words with different scalarity and propose detailed teaching strategies of scalar inferencing for junior high school students based on corresponding models.Based on opposing scalar inferencing models predicted respectively by Levinson’s defaultist approach and relevance theory,the present study makes use of truth-value judgement paradigm in which participants,158 junior high school students in the eighth grade,are asked to provide their intuitive judgements to some under-informative sentences.This online experiment is conducted by Open Sesame 3.3.8 and participants response times are recorded to clarify corresponding scalar inferencing models.The following particular research questions are explored:(1)What are the response time patterns for junior high school students across different scalar words?(2)What are the response time patterns for junior high school students across the scalar words with different scalarity?The major findings are as follows:(1)For junior high school students,response time patterns are different across scalar words.That is,the pragmatic response times for ‘high’,‘like’are longer than that of literal responses.The pragmatic response times for ‘dislike’ is shorter than that of literal responses.(2)For junior high school students,response time patterns vary with the scalarity.For positively scalar words,pragmatic response times take longer than literal response times.By contrast,pragmatic response times take shorter than that of literal responses when it comes to negatively scalar words.In sum,the results indicate that cognitive cost is not a common property for all scalar words.It is suggested that the processing model is determined by the scalarity of scalar words.This study has a great theoretical and practical significance for scalar inferencing.In theory,the findings may shed light on exploring the scalar inferencing model employed by junior high school students,which contributes to the limited studies focusing on this particular group.For instruction,targeting at the features of two inferencing models,several tentative teaching strategies are put forward for junior high school students to derive and construct scalar implicature accurately and appropriately.It includes the input of metapragmatic knowledge concerning scalar implicature,the input of sufficient context,communicative output and corrective reflection on learners’ scalar inferencing.In the future,the research should explore a great diversity in scalar words to make the findings more generalizable.Meanwhile,the underlying mechanism of scalar inferencing needs to be investigated deeply with various instruments in pragmatics,aiming to provide evidence for proposing teaching strategies on scalar inferencing.