Turkish EFL learners' comprehension and production of implicatures

The purpose of the present study is to investigate to what extent Turkish upperintermediate level learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) can comprehend and produce implicatures. To this end, 90 participants first completed a 14-item multiple-choice test, and then responded to 12 situations in a discourse completion task (DCT). The scores of the participants were compared, and analysed according to descriptive and inferential statistics. The results of the comprehension data analysis indicated that the participants had a moderately high level of success. Although the learners had considerable difficulty in comprehending understated negative criticism items, which flout the maxim of quantity, they were highly competent in comprehending relevance implicatures. The rates of success in quality and manner implicature comprehension were moderate. Participants were more successful in understanding particularised implicatures when compared with generalised implicatures. A significant difference was not observed between the implicature comprehension levels of boys and girls. As for the production aspect, out of 1080 participant responses to the DCT instrument, 762 contained implicatures. The mostly widely flouted maxim was the quality maxim for the purposes of creating sarcasm and achieving face management and politeness. Students also preferred to flout the maxim of quality when responding to bad news or expressing anger in an unpleasant situation. When trying to express their opinions about the quality of a particular thing/person, participants tended to flout the maxim of quantity to avoid saying their opinions directly, and making the referent disappointed. The participants did not tend to make use of implicatures in the case of requesting. The participants who realised requests via implicatures flouted the quantity maxim mostly. In order to see whether the participants? level of pragmatic production was compatible with the target language norms, their responses were rated for appropriacy. The ratings revealed that the appropriacy of the responses were moderately high. Apart from this, it was concluded that a significant relationship did not exist between the pragmatic comprehension and production levels of the participants.