| This study explores Chinese speakers’cognitive processing model of scalar implicature (SI). Emanating from theoretical divergences in pragmatics, three eminent models of language processing emerge, respectively default model (DM), standardization model (SM), and context-driven model (CM). Such divergences originate from the Gricean dichotomy of an utterance into "what is said" and "what is implicated", initiating the long-lasting controversy in both pure pragmatics debates and experimental explorations. In theory, one branch of the neo-Gricean school focuses on generalized conversational implicature (GCI) and proposes the default reasoning; and the other branch conceives a standardization notion, stemming from speech act schema (SAS). Being radically discrete, the post-Gricean school posits the Principle of Relevance as an ultimate canon to infer meanings. In justification of each model via experimental approaches, SI is recurrently adopted in experiments of the processing; and incessant corroboration is earned but without a concordant conclusion. Therefore, this study is intended to participate in the heated disputes about the three models. The pivotal objective of this thesis is to substantiate SM, rather than DM and CM, to a more explicable model for SI cognitive processing.In an attempt of the objective, (1) a prudent selection of testing materials is elemental; and (2) a manipulated testing mechanism is crucial. From Experiment 1 and 2, I found gradable adjectives (GAs) were sensitive to the on-line and off-line experimental design; and thus I decided to adopt GA as the core of testing materials. Experiment 3 emphasized on the design of situational contexts; Experiment 4 made some alternations to the materials in Experiment 3 and further verified SM as a more explicable model. All data were analyzed via SPSS 20.0. A total of 211 Chinese native speakers were involved in my study. They were students randomly chosen from Lanzhou University with none linguistics majors. They were gender-balanced and the mean age was between 22 and 23 year. The on-line experiments were conducted in sound-proofing rooms in the Experimental Pragmatics Laboratory of School of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Lanzhou University; all the materials were displayed via the software DMDX and participants’responses and response time (RT) were automatically recorded.(1) Experiment 1 was a redo of Doran et al. (2012), aiming to testify participants’ability to consistently distinguish saying from implying under different instructions. Ninety students, randomly chosen from the population described above, participated the truth-value judgment task via off-line questionnaires and data of 82 qualified participants were analyzed. Results indicated that participants were able to identify GCI from an utterance and an objective third-person perspective affected that ability. The design of Experiment 2 was identical to that of Experiment 1 despite of RT recording. Another 64 participants completed the task and the results suggested consistency with those in Experiment 1, though the objective third-person perspective might not be adaptable to the timed design.(2) With an attentive scrutiny on Q-implicatures, the identification of GCI rate in GA was rather different in previous two experiments. Therefore, I endeavored in the rest two experiments to testify that SM was more explicable than DM and CM, employing GAs as the representative of SI. Experiment 3 aimed to control three core factors of SM, respectively mutual contextual beliefs (MCBs), speaker’s communicative intention, and impliciture. The scalar words<çƒ[hot], 烫[burning]> were to describe the heat of nine kinds of food and drink, situated in food offering scenarios concerning upper-bound context (UBC), lower-bound context (LBC), and neutral contexts (NC). Another 15 participants from the same population were asked to make their choices between "Then take it now" and "Then take it later" after reading each scenario. An after-test interview helped to collect valuable opinions on the items selected. Results indicated that items selection influenced the intention-oriented design and MCBs, and thus some alternations and a more tangible criterion were in great need. Experiment 4 made some alternations concerning the feedbacks from the pilot. The post-test questionnaire with temperature scales for each kind of food served as a tangible criterion of item selection. Other 20 students participated the pilot. Results suggested that the intentional-oriented design of contexts, MCB-entailing and fixed impliciture items were proper to verify SM. Thus, in Experiment 4, another 22 participants completed the task. Data from Experiment 4 confirmed the SM design.Three major findings are obtained from this study. (1) Participants are able to distinguish implicating from saying and different instructions affect that ability. (2) GA, a specially type of SI, is both literally processed and context-sensitive. (3) SM is a more explicable model than DM and CM, in which MCBs avail the recognition of speaker’s intention and thus facilitate verbal communication. This finding provides a support to the conclusion of the study by Garret & Harnish (2007). |
