Investigation of L2/Ln Pragmatic Competence: Its Core and Route Map

Abstract

How to use language properly and acquire the capacity for language use has become the focus of linguists and philosophers for centuries. Therefore, pragmatic competence underlying language use arouses enormous interests of language acquisition practitioners. This study reveals the core properties of various models or theories of pragmatic competence, such as the communicative componential models, the form-function mapping proposal of the functionalist, the tripartite cognitive model, and the current integrated model of pragmatic competence. The common core includes (but not limited to) integration of thought and communication, one uniform pragmatic mechanism, dynamic form-function mapping, and complementarity between grammatical and pragmatic competences. With the findings as a departure, a brief outline for further investigation of pragmatic competence is proposed finally, including pathological and neurobiological examination of pragmatic competence.

Pragmatic Competence and Willingness to Communicate Among L2 Learners of Chinese

“…That is, if the CSL learners perceived their communicative competence to be high, they showed better performance in terms of comprehension of implicatures. The construct of communicative competence includes how to utilize pragmatic knowledge to communicate with others ( Mao, 2021 ). Thus, if L2 learners can accurately self-assess their actual communicative competence, they perform well in the comprehension of some implicatures ( Jamrus and Razali, 2019 ).…”

A Comparative Study of Chinese EFL Undergraduates’ Pragmatic Competence in English Letter Writing Between Urban and Suburban Universities

“…According to Timple-Laughlin, et al (2015, p.14), pragmatic competence was "the dynamic and interactive negotiation of intended meaning between two or more individuals in a particular situation". Mao (2021) stated that whether from communicative or functional perspectives, pragmatic competence involved linguistic and sociocultural knowledge, which was in accordance with Leech's (1983) classification of pragmatic competence into pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence. Pragmalinguistic competence refers to the ability to use linguistic elements to perform speech acts (Cenzo, 2007), while sociopragmatic competence is the ability to use various speech-act strategies based on the situational or social variables in communication (Harlow, 1990).…”

Pragmatic competence, autistic language use and the basic properties of human language

“…Take the egocentric but steady mental computation of autistic individuals as a departure, it seems reasonable to presume that the abstract linguistic computations relying on the operations and interactions of the internal linguistic subsystems/submodules remain nearly intact, and the sociopragmatic deficiencies could be attributed to other factors, such as the insufficient interactions between linguistic subsystems/submodules and sociocultural contexts (because of DEP or others). 3 In this case, a proper way to address what autistic language use implies might lie in how to expound the respective developmental trajectories and functioning of grammatical and pragmatic competences for autistic language learners and users, and in particular, the distinct development and unfolding of "internal pragmatic competence (IPC) and pragmatic competence for external communication (PCEC)" under an Integrated Model of Pragmatic Competence (IMPC) (Mao, 2020b(Mao, , 2021Mao & He, 2021).…”

“…In this vein, the central cognitive system (language module) not only involves the systems for input (hearer's perception) and output (speaker's production) but also the thought system, as well as a central generative system (syntactic submodule-"the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN)" (Hauser et al, 2002)) that the thought and input-output (sound) systems access in many kinds of language uses (Chomsky, 2018). Thus, the inherent mental interactions among the submodules within "the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)" (Hauser et al, 2002) can be sketched in Figure 1 (Mao, 2020b(Mao, , 2021.…”