The purpose of this dissertation is to explain how people figure out the explicit meaning of speaker''s utterance through explicature, which is one of the key concepts of Relevance Theory(hereafter RT). Sperber & Wilson, who were the inventors of RT, embraced the central claim of Grice theory that human communication is the process of expressing one''s intentions and recognizing them.
From now on, most of pragmatic researches have mainly focused on the implicit meaning of utterance, since inferring the speaker''s intention behind the utterance has been regarded to be the most important thing to succeed communication. However, fully understanding the explicit meaning of utterances has to be preceded to infer what the speaker means and it is equally crucial to the utterance comprehension process. Also, people who are communicating with strangers, not used to the conversational situation, not aware of the conversation topic, or not communicating in their mother tongue, have hard time figuring out what the speaker is saying quickly because they cannot fully use the contextual cues to recover the explicit meaning. That is to say, pragmatic inference is indispensable to understand the explicit meaning of the utterance.
For these reasons, this dissertation focuses on the pragmatic process of recovering the explicit meaning of utterances using the notion of explicature. RT said in the process of deriving explicature, the principles of relevance are involved. So, I first examined the crucial claims of RT and relevance-guided comprehension heuristic in Chapter 2. After that, I studied prior researches which tried to apply RT to second language acquisition(SLA). Since RT is deeply interested in the cognitive systems which governs human communication, RT can provide theoretical foundation to SLA studies which have focused on the human cognitive processes in second language learning.
In the framework of RT, substantial elements of pragmatic inference are involved in the recovery of both explicature and implicature, so there seems not to be a clear distinction them. Despite of the criticism that there is no robust test to distinguish pragmatic inferences which generate explicatures from those that give rise to implicatures, we''d better stick to the relevance-theoretic notion of explicature because even when someone directly convey what she/he means so the utterance brings no implicature at all, we need help from pragmatic inference to understand it. In this situation, explicature is the only tool to explain the inferencing process. I suggest some distinct characteristics of explicatures and implicatures to help us sharpen our instinct to distinguish explicature and implicature in Chapter 3, but the easiest way to divide them is just remember what the speaker wants to convey directly and explicitly is recovered by explicature and the others are by implicature.
In Chapter 4, this dissertation explored the various pragmatic processes of deriving explicatures. Carston, who has been deeply studying explicatures, summed up the process of explicature derivation. He said a hearer gets through following four pragmatic processes as well as decodes linguistic contents to comprehend explicit contents of an utterance; disambiguation, saturation, free enrichment, and ad-hoc concept construction. However, I don''t see any reasons to separate partially pragmatic processes such as saturation and disambiguation and fully pragmatic processes like free enrichment and ad-hoc concept construction, since explicatature derivation processes are all guided by pragmatic principles.
Moreover, reference assignment, disambiguation, and ad-hoc concept construction have in common that a hearer should select which sense or concept of a word communicated is being conveyed by a speaker. In other words, the process a hearer gets through when he tries to figure out what a pronoun is referring to seems to be similar to the process where she/he finds out which sense of a polysemy is used in speaker''s utterance. Also, this process can apply to the way a person comprehends a modified concept of a word in the utterance provided. For these reasons, I suggested reference assignment, disambiguation, and ad-hoc concept construction can be included in the process of pragmatic meaning selection. Pragmatic meaning selection process is able to explain all pragmatic effects to comprehend the communicated meaning of words appearing in the utterance.
Explicit meaning of utterances cannot be completed only by comprehending all the words appearing in the utterances, since sometime we need to enrich the meaning of covert constituents of utterances to make the explicit meaning relevant enough. I suggested all pragmatic processes to complete the meaning of constituents which do not appear in the utterance itself fall into the pragmatic enrichment process. In this process, saturation, which is known for the obligatory process to truth-conditional meaning of an utterance, free enrichment, and the recovery of pragmatic ellipsis, which happens not because of the syntactic reasons, are all included.
Lastly, in Chapter 5, I suggested the notion of explicature can shed a light on the development of L2 comprehension proficiency. This is because pragmatic inference should be added to figure out what the speaker is directly expressing when not communicating in their mother tongues. Accordingly, it is important in L2 instructions to make learners notice that explicature should be derived when comprehending explicit meaning of utterances. If teachers or native speakers attract learners'' attention to pragmatic explicature derivation processes through interactional modification strategies, such as clarification request, confirmation check, and comprehension check, they can realize they should add pragmatic inferences to understand the explicit meaning of utterances.
Nowadays, we are trying to provide learners to authentic materials like movies, TV dramas, songs, news, etc., to make them more motivated and engaged. To understand authentic materials, they should utilize the explicature derivation processes because there usually appear lots of utterances that couldn''t be comprehended without the pragmatic meaning selection process and pragmatic enrichment process.
To sum up, comprehending the explicit meaning of utterances is the first step to understand what the speaker means and pragmatic inference processes should be involved in the comprehension process of the explicit meaning. So, the relevance-theoretic term, explicature is a plausible and reasonable tool to explain how we understand the proposition expressed. Since the explicature derivation process is guided by the principles of relevance, we can say that when a hear receives an ostensive stimulus, she/he takes it as a relevant information to him/her and interprets the explicit meaning of the utterance through the process of the pragmatic meaning selection, and pragmatic enrichment, following a path of least efforts until her/his expectations of relevance are satisfied.