UNPACKING PRAGMATIC INCONSISTENCIES: CONTEXTUAL CUES IN SCALAR IMPLICATURE COMPREHENSION

Abstract

It is crucial to understand how language users interpret scalar implicatures, particularly the words “some” versus “all,” to enhance pragmatic competence in language learners and artificial structures. This research explored how respondents reconcile literal and implied meanings and what contextual elements facilitate accurate scalar interpretation.  It sought to understand how disagreement between literal and implied meaning is resolved by respondents and what contextual data supports correct scalar interpretation. A quasi-experimental design was used with ten 17–20-year-old Telugu-speaking students with no training in pragmatics for an in-depth, qualitative investigation of their linguistic behaviour. Materials included 15 visual-narrative stimuli, warm-up trials, fillers, and pre-and post-test questionnaires assessing scalar understanding and contextual cue awareness. Respondents underwent a pre-test, exposure to context-rich stimuli, and a post-test. Findings demonstrated significant improvement following intervention: the respondents who had moderate performance in the pre-test passed to the near-ceiling performance in the post-test to detect the mismatch of some-all, systematically rejected pragmatically odd but logically true utterances, and reported a better contextual-cue awareness (pre-test means 3.2-3.5 to post-test means 4.7-5.0), demonstrating the evidence of the improvement in scaling-implicature detection and pragmatic anomaly repair. These results directly address the research objectives and show the efficacy of multimodal cues in fostering pragmatic comprehension. The study proves that contextual teaching greatly enhances inferential pragmatic ability in L2 learners. A larger, more heterogeneous sample, objective tests (eye-tracking), and an experiment of subtler implicatures in virtual reality should be used in future studies.