L2 tolerance of pragmatic violations of informativeness

Abstract

This study sets out to investigate second language (L2) speakers’ derivation of pragmatic inferences and tolerance of violations of informativeness in two types of inferences, i.e., ad hoc implicatures and contrastive inference. The results of a graded judgment task revealed that pragmatic tolerance is inference-specific: L2 speakers were overly tolerant of underinformative statements in ad hoc implicatures than in contrastive inference. In addition, L2 speakers were found to be more relaxed with overinformativeness than underinformativeness in contrastive inference. The fact that L2 speakers tend to be redundant (overinformative) than ambiguous (underinformative) is further discussed with the Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis (Lozano, 2016). This study hopes to contribute to a more find-grained understanding of L2 speakers’ abilities of deriving pragmatic inferences.