EFL Learners' Pragmatic Tolerance of Quantity Maxim Violation

Abstract

The current study embarks on investigating Iraqi EFL learners' pragmatic tolerance of quantity maxim violations. Additionally, it seeks to shed light on Iraqi EFL learners' pragmatic abilities in deriving pragmatic inferences from utterances that contain violations of quantity maxim. The experimental work in the current study utilized two types of sentence judgment tasks. Binary sentence judgment task for investigating learners' pragmatic tolerance, and ternary judgment task for investigating learners' pragmatic competence. The study included two groups of participants. The first group included 50 participants from 2nd-year students, and the second included 50 from 4th-year students at the Department of English for the academic year 2023-2024; both groups judged underinformative scalar implicature utterances. The results with binary task data indicate that Iraqi EFL learners exhibit tolerance toward quantity maxim violations. However, the ternary judgment task results indicate that Iraqi learners are not competent enough to derive a pragmatic inference. Hence, the current study attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of EFL learners' pragmatic abilities to derive implied meanings.