Implicature and Applying the concept to teach listening and speaking skills

Implicature and Applying the concept to teach listening and speaking skills Implicature and Applying the concept to teach listening and speaking skills Author Tran Thi Thu Trang (18 10 86), student of English M A course 18th, class C, in the Department of Postgraduate Studies, College of Foreign Languages at Vietnam National University Abstract Implicature is a common linguistic phenomenon which occurs in all languages In English teaching classroom context, students may experience some difficult.

Implicature and Applying the concept to teach listening and

speaking skills

Author

Tran Thi Thu Trang (18.10.86), student of English M.A course 18th, class C, in the Department of Postgraduate Studies, College of Foreign Languages at Vietnam National University

Abstract

Implicature is a common linguistic phenomenon which occurs in all languages In English teaching classroom context, students may experience some difficulties in interpretation of implicature in listening comprehension exercises or speaking practice In general, if the conversation is simple and direct, students can know exactly what is being said through the literal meaning In fact, however, there are conversations in which the speakers say one thing and mean another And we call

this phenomenon implicature.

This article first examines Grice's Cooperative principle and Maxims of conversation as well as types of implicature and then suggests some listening and speaking techniques and activities applying the concept "Implicature" in teaching listening and speaking skills

Keywords

Cooperative principle, maxims of conversation, implicature, applying the concept

"Implicature" to teach listening and speaking skills

Students today are demanded with full competence of English Understand what is being said and communicate successfully are core requirements for most students

In the context of English listening and speaking classrooms, it is important for teachers to develop students' competence to understand the real meaning of what is being said when exposed to a short conversation and then they can take further action- to make a choice, filling the blanks, or answer the questions More importantly, this can assist students to improve the speaking skill In conversation

we usually understand what is said directly and straightforwardly That is we base

on the original or literal meaning of the words But there are cases that seem the conversation is expressed indirectly, so students cannot make the right judgment if they only consider its literal meaning The two following examples will illustrate the point:

Exchange 1:

 Jack: Did you enjoy Animal farm?

 Lyly: No, I don't

Exchange 2:

 Jack: Did you enjoy Animal farm?

 Lyly: I only like detective stories

In the exchange 1, Lyly gives the direct and relevant answer to Jack's question, and the listener is easy to infer the meaning : They are talking about a story and Lyly does not like it In the case of the exchange 2, the two speakers are also talking about the story but Lyly does not give the direct answer to Jack's question instead

by suggesting another topic It seems quite irrelevant in the surface structure level

as far as the question- answer is concerned If we believe that the two people in the conversation are cooperative and that their conversation is meaningful, we would assume that the answer must be relevant to the question and we need interpret more

than the literal meaning of the sentence by applying the other way round Here Jack puts what Lyly has said together with other piece of information he has and he

comes up with a new piece of information The process is:

What Lyly said: Lyly only likes detective stories.

Jack know that: Animal farm is not a detective story.

Therefore: Lyly does not like Animal farm.

So for the listeners in listening comprehension as well as speaking classroom, it is most important that they should be aware the two speakers in a conversation is

observing one common principle—the Cooperative Principle (CP), which

generates the meaning of the whole conversation: sometimes obvious and direct;

sometimes implied and expressed in a round-about way- It is called implicature.

We find that implicature is a common phenomenon in daily conversations Most students have difficulties in indentifying conversational implicatures However, implicature is not officially mentioned as a techniques in teaching English, specifically, in teaching listening and speaking skills

Cooperative principle and Maxims of conversation

Grice's first insight was that there might be some general principles behind how

hearers retrieve implicatures This basis idea was this: communication is a cooperative activity, so when two people are communicating, it is in both their

interests to make the communication go as smoothly as possible in order to achieve their mutual aim But what counts as being cooperative? Grice's answer to this

question is that speakers follow a general cooperative principle It is defined as

follow:

" Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged"

This implies that you need not and should not supply information which you can assume that your audience already has- just as suggested by the principles of

necessity and sufficiency The Cooperative principle can be broken down into a number of different maxims of conversation, which fall into four basis categories:

Maxims of quantity ("say just as much as is necessary"):

 Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.

 Do not make the contribution more informative than is required.

This maxim means that the speaker/writer has to include all the information that the addressee requires to understand If the speaker leaves out a crucial piece of information, the addressee will not understand what the speaker is trying to say But

it is not necessary for the speaker/writer to provide the information that is not necessary or required

Example on the maxim of quantity:

 Mum: Did you finish your homework?

 Pat: I finished my algebra

 Mum: Well, get busy and finish your English, too!

The child did not say that her English homework is not done, nor did she imply it Nevertheless her mother is entitled to draw this conclusion, based on the combination of what the child actually said and the cooperative principle

Maxims of quality ("tell the truth"):

 Do not say what you believe to be false.

 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Example on maxims of quality:

 A: Should I buy my son this new sports car?

 B: I don’t know if that’s such a good idea His record isn’t so great

 B’s answer is truthful and it is supported by evidence

Maxims of relation ("stick to the point")

 Be relevant.

Relevance is an extremely important principle in linguistics In the context of Grice's Co-operative principle, the demand for relevance simply means that the speaker/writer should only include information in his communication that is relevant to the discourse topic It is interesting to observe that the perceptions of what is relevant and what is irrelevant diverges among people This shows that relevance is a matter of degree, not something absolute In linguistics that is quite typical Hardly anything is set in stone, almost everything is a matter of degree or

statistical frequency This is also a problem with Gricean approach What exactly is

relevance? What makes one contribution relevant and another not? Grice himself was acutely aware of this vagueness in what it is to be relevant but never him came

up with a precise formulation

Example on maxims of relation:

 A: How are you doing in school?

 B: Not too well, actually I'm failing two of my classes

 B’s answer is relevant

Maxims of manner ("be clear")

 Avoid obscurity.

 Avoid ambiguity.

 Be brief.

 Be orderly.

Example on maxims of manner:

- John got into Columbia and won a scholarship

 “and” means that both linked events occurred, but implicates also temporal progression due to the maxim of manner: be orderly.

Classification of implicature

In the above we have had a full discussion about Grice’s Cooperative principle and the its maxims We see that in any kind of conversation it’s usually the case that both the speaker and the listener will observe the Cooperative principle However these maxims are not always fulfilled A speaker may quietly violate a maxim, he may be faced with a clash between different maxims, or he may flout a maxim in such a way that the listener can be assumed to understand that this is being done The latter case is especially interesting since it gives rise to a "conversational implicature" that is at variance with the literal meaning of the utterance In such a

case, the speaker is said to "exploit" a maxim.

Implicatures: A special case of situations in which the perceived meaning extends beyond the literal meaning.

"It is clear that implicature plays a major role in language change, triggering both syntactic and semantic changes Indeed it seems to be one of the single most important mechanisms whereby matters of language usage feed back into and affect matters of language structure [Levinson, p 166]

According to Grice and Yule (1998), implicatures are classified into two main types:

Conventional implicatures which is additional unstated meaning associated with

the use of specific words such as but, and, therefore, even, yet, or Therefore, we

can draw out that conventional implicatures are not based on cooperative principle

or maxims and independent from the context for their interpretation For instance,

 George is short but brave (contrast)

 Sue and Bill are divorced (conjunction)

 He jumped on his horse and rode away (sequence)

 I dropped the camera and it broke (consequence)

Conversational implicatures which are inferred via the cooperative principle or

maxims

Example: A: I am out of petrol.

B: There is a garage around the corner

Grice also distinguishes conversational implicatures that depend heavily on context

or occasion ("particularized conversational implicatures") from those that do not ("generalized conversational implicatures") According to Yule (1998) the former

are inferences which are required to work out the conveyed meaning…when our conversations take place in very specific contexts in which locally recognized inferences are assumed The latter, no special knowledge is required in the context

to calculate the additional conveyed meaning The two following examples can be seen as illustration:

Exchange 1: Doobie: Did you invite Bella and Cathy?

Mary: I invited Bella

So Mary means that she did not invite Bella  generalized conversational implicature

Exchange 2: Rick: Hey, coming to the wild party tonight?

Tom: My parents are visiting

Tom implies that he cannot come  particularized conversational implicature

Classification of conversations that involve in implicature in listening comprehension

We have talked about the Cooperative principle and maxims in the above section

In listening comprehension (either in examinations or in the classroom), students somehow are having difficulties in interpreting the conversational implicatures from the dialogue they hear The same situation also occurs in speaking classroom Imagine that you were in a conversation with others and you would not understand what they mean, then the conversation would be failed

In English listening comprehension, as far as the conversation are involved, they fall into several categories:

The first one are those that observe the cooperative principle very strictly and are easy to infer the meaning For example,

 A: I'd like to buy some fruit

 B: Which fruit do you want?

In this example both the speakers are very cooperative and the answer to the question is relevant and informative enough to provide the sufficient information that the first speaker needs To these kinds of conversation it is not a difficult task for the both the students and the teacher

The second one are those through the flouting of CP maxim(s) there evokes the conversational implicature that listeners should try hard to interpret The types of conversation that need to be interpreted to figure out the implicature includes

(Laurence F.B, 1999):

1 Relevance

 A: How about going for a walk?

 B: Isn’t it raining out?

2 Indirect criticism:

The Indirect Criticism implicature often follows a request for an evaluation of something When expressed using this implicature, the evaluation is negative That effect is achieved by praising some unimportant feature of the item being evaluated, thus implying that there is nothing more flattering that can be said For example,

 A: Have you seen Robin Hood?

 B: Yeah I went last night

 A: What did you think of it?

 B: The cinematography was great

 A: Oh, that bad, hug?

3 Sequence-based implicature

Sequence-based implicatures are based on the assumption that unless there are indications to the contrary, events being described occur in the order in which they are expressed The effect of this assumption is easily seen in the difference in the

sequence of events implied by sentences such as :

 Jack drove to Chicago and had dinner

 Jack had dinner and drove to Chicago

4 Irony:

For example:

Context: Bill and Peter work together in the same office They sometimes are sent

on business trips together and are becoming good friends They often have lunch together and Peter has even invited Bill to have dinner with him and his wife at their home several times Now Peter’s friends have told him that they that they saw Bill out dancing with Peter’s wife recently while Peter was out of town on a business trip On hearing this, Peter’s comment was…

 Peter: Bill knows how to be a really good friend, doesn’t he?

Applying the concept "Implicature" to teach listening and speaking skills

In English classroom, the importance of interpreting the conversational implicature

is obvious For the teacher, his/her major task should not be just finish the class by letting the students listen to the materials again and again and then provide the correct answers to the questions Instead the toughest part of the job is that how to support the students in the process of listening and speaking, and how to develop the competence of implicature interpretation in English classroom This part presents some listening and speaking techniques and activities with the hope that they can assist students in interpretation of implicature

First of all, teachers should explain what implicature is, try to make explanation simple enough and avoid using linguistic terms

For teaching listening comprehension, teachers should

Choose authentic material: Authenticity should be evident both in language and in

task The language should reflect real discourse, including hesitations, rephrasing, and a variety of accents Use of authentic material, such as workplace training videos, audio tapes of actual workplace exchanges, and TV and radio broadcasts,

increases transferability to listening outside of the ESL classroom context to work

and to community

Prepare learners psychologically for the listening activity, telling them that they

will not be able to understand everything they hear, and that they should not panic because of this

Engage the learners in pre-listening activity: This activity should establish the

purpose of the listening activity and activate the schemata by encouraging the learners to think about and discuss what they already know about the content of the listening text This activity can also provide the background needed for them to understand the text, and it can focus attention on what to listen for

For teaching speaking skill, teacher should create teaching activities for all kinds

of implicatures from easy (generalized) to difficult (particularized) These activities

can be conducted these in class or some can be given as homework if the time is limited

Here are some speaking activities applying the concept "Implicature"

Activity 1: Ask a student to tell the class a short funny story, or, especially, a short

funny conversation Then, ask students to analyze the reason why it is funny

Activity 2: Ask some pairs of students to compose a short conversation which will

make the class laugh The class will vote which is the best Students have to