摘要
Due to the increasing opportunities for face-to-face communication, students should be able to understand utterances in a particular context. Grice’s conversational implicature theory, mainly consisting of the cooperative principle and the maxims, purports to explain what is conveyed by an utterance. Austin and Searle’s speech act theories contribute to the functional explanation of language and explore the illocutionary acts beyond the literal meaning of utterances. With these theories as the theoretical framework, the author proposes a way to improve students’ ability to interpret utterances, that is, teaching theories of conversational implicature and speech act, creating an appropriate and plausible context and inculcating cultural knowledge of the target language.
Due to the increasing opportunities for face-to-face communication, students should be able to understand utterances in a particular context. Grice's conversational implicature theory, mainly consisting of the cooperative principle and the maxims, purports to explain what is conveyed by an utterance. Austin and Searle's speech act theories contribute to the functional explanation of language and explore the illocutionary acts beyond the literal meaning of utterances. With these theories as the theoretical framework, the author proposes a way to improve students' ability to interpret utterances, that is, teaching theories of conversational implicature and speech act, creating an appropriate and plausible context and inculcating cultural knowledge of the target language.
