Testing implicature under operational conditions

Pragmatics as an overall construct is concerned with the influence of situational and social context on language use (Austin, 1962; Crystal, 1997; Mey, 2001), be it through the representation of objects and concepts by means of reference and deixis, the indexing of social relationships by means of politeness or honorifics, or the creation of implicature through the flouting of conversational maxims. While pragmatic knowledge and ability for use is an uncontroversial part of general L2 communicative cornpetence (Bachman, 1990; Bachrnan & Palmer, 1996), testing instruments for L2 pragmatics had been underrepresented in language test development until the mid-90s. Since then, several projects have been undertaken to develop tests of second language pragmatics (for overviews and critiques, see McNamara & Roever, 2006; Roever, 2011). The instruments developed so far have focused on the sociopragmatic appropriateness of speech acts (Ahn, 2005; Hudson, Detmer & Brown, 1995; Tada, 2005; Yamashita, 1996; Yoshitake, 1997; Liu, 2006), pragmalinguistic knowledge of implicature, routines and speech acts (Bouton, 1988, 1994, 1999; Roever, 1996, 2005, 2006), speech styles (Cook, 2001), and compliments (Walters, 2004, 2007). Some further testing instruments have been developed for acquisitional and psycholinguistic research studies in the area of speech acts (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei, 1998; Matsumura, 2001, 2003) and implicature (Taguchi, 2005, 2007, 2008).