An Experimental Study On Cancellability Of Conversational Implicatures

Conversational implicatures are assumed to arise when speakers intend to conveyfar more than what they say by their utterances. In the majority of cases speakerscommunicate their intended meanings not through what is said but rather throughwhat is implicated. According to the classic Gricean theory, the generated implicaturecan be cancelled subsequently when the inference is blocked either explicitly orcontextually without incurring any contradiction, the feature of which is calledcancellability or defeasibility. A great number of scholars have been intrigued totackle issues of cancellability and achieved illuminating results. Their studies havepioneered the research of cancellability and contributed to our understanding of thischaracteristic. However, the issue of cancellability has rarely been investigatedthrough experimental studies.The present study attempts to experimentally advance the discussion oncancellability of conversational implicatures by taking80Masters of Art majoring inEnglish as subjects so as to address the following principal research questions:(1) Doadvanced Chinese English learners have the awareness of cancellability ofconversational implicatures?(2) Do the participants respond differently to explicitcancellation and contextual cancellation of conversational implicatures?(3) What arethe major factors that influence their judgments of cancellability of conversationalimplicatures? Three experiments are accordingly carried out in the form of aquestionnaire. Experiments One and Two are about explicit cancellation andcontextual cancellation respectively. Participants are required to decide the validity ofa speaker‘s utterances (Experiment One), and judge whether a given FACT conflictswith a speaker‘s utterances (Experiment Two). Experiment Three is concerned withboth explicit and contextual cancellation, consisting of four scenarios in whichdetailed description and specific contextual information are provided. Similarly,participants are asked to judge possible interpretations and give brief explanation. Experimental results suggest that advanced Chinese English learners aresensitive to cancellability of conversational implicatures. They can recognize andinterpret the process of cancellation successfully, especially in the case of explicitcancellation. A significant difference is found in their performance between explicitcancellation and contextual cancellation. More importantly, context proves to be acrucial factor that propels the successful interpretation of cancellability besides worldknowledge. Having not only provided certain evidence for Grice‘s cancellability ofconversational implicatures, but also thrown light on advanced Chinese Englishlearners‘pragmatic competence, these findings are valuable for future studies toexperimentally investigate cancellability.