Analyzing Conventional Implicatures in Conversations of Students at Undergraduate Level

Abstract

Conventional implicatures are one of the essential fields of pragmatics, which deals with the meaning of a linguistic expression as it goes beyond what is written in the actual word meanings. Conventional implicatures are assigned to a specific lexical item and construction, and are fairly context-stable. This study attempts to explore meanings and the interpretations of conventional implicatures in English in conversations of undergraduate students. The study takes a quantitative approach using a structured questionnaire in which the participants' capacity to detect imputativeness of conventional implicature triggers and other conventional linguistic expressions (but, even, therefore, only, although, and non-restrictive relative clauses), which are connected to them, are evaluated. The data are gathered from the undergraduate students, studying in various fields. Participants are recruited via online forum and social networking with a snowball sampling technique, in which the researchers send out the questionnaire to different students. Data obtained from the participants are computed statistically with descriptive and inferential techniques to describe the participants' pragmatic competency levels. The results are planned to support development of understanding of pragmatic awareness among university students and insights for pragmatic aspects of language education and on pragmatic studies.