ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167

Conversational implicature in a second language :

Learned slowly when not deliberately taught
Lawrence F. Bouton

Division of English as an International Language, 3070 Foreign Language Building,

University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), 707 S. Mathews Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Received January 1993; revised version July 1993

Abstract

The importance of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975) in expressing a message indi-

rectly is well established. Yet Keenan (1976) has shown that members of different cultures
derive different implicatures from the same utterance in essentially the same context, and
Bouton (1988) found that even reasonably proficient nonnative speakers (NNS) of English
(average TOEFL score = 550) interpret implicatures differently from American native speak-
ers (NS) 21% of the time. Yet relatively few examples of implicature appear in ESL text-
books and few of those are dealt with directly (Bouton, 1990). These facts, then, suggest that
little attempt is made in the ESL/EFL classroom to make learners aware of implicature as a
tool of communication or to give them practice at using it in English. And this raises a ques-
tion: can NNS learn to use implicature with little or no direct instruction. To investigate this
question, two groups of international students at an American university who had been tested
with regard to their ability to interpret implicatures when they fist arrived on campus were
tested again 18 and 54 months later, respectively. This paper reports on their progress in
regard both to the overall set of implicatures and to various specific types identified during
the original study.

1. Introduction

The importance of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975) as a means of

expressing a message indirectly is well established. Participants in a conversation,
Grice said, expect each other to make their contributions to that conversation truth-
ful, relevant, clear, and sufficiently informative. If the literal meaning of something
that is said fails to meet these expectations, the listeners search for another possible
meaning for that utterance in that particular context and if they find one, they assume
the latter meaning to be the message the speaker intended to convey. To the extent
that the speaker and the listener(s) have a common understanding of these expecta-

0378-2166/94/$07,00 0 1994 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

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158 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167

tions and perceive the utterance and its context in much the same way, implicature
will prove to be an effective strategy. What’s more, it is very common - so common,
in fact, says Green (1989), as to be completely ordinary and unremarkable.
But is implicature ordinary and unremarkable among speakers of all languages?
Given essentially the same external context, will an utterance that leads an American
English speaker to employ implicature in interpreting it lead speakers from other lan-
guages to do the same? And, if so, will the message derived be the same? Can impli-
cature be counted on to be an effective tool in cross-cultural interaction?
The first person to deal directly with these questions was Keenan (1976). She
found that the Malagasy, a people of Madagascar, did not expect speakers to be
informative in many contexts where Europeans or Americans would have expected
it. As a result, in interacting with the Malagasy, the Westerners could easily derive
the wrong message from a Malagasy utterance because they would tend to use impli-
cature when they should not have; and the Malagasy might equally well misinterpret
the European or the American because of a failure to use implicature when they were
expected to. In short, Keenan found that while both the Malagasy and those from the
Western world do expect speakers to be informative, the differences in the contexts
to which that expectation applies are sufficient to disrupt communication between
speakers from those disparate cultural backgrounds.
Keenan’s approach to the cross-cultural study of implicature was ethnographic.
Another approach that could be taken and would provide a different sort of data
would be the use of a written elicitation instrument administered to a large sample.
This was the approach I took in a study begun in 1986 of the ability of nonnative
English-speaking (NNS) university students to derive the same message from impli-
catures in English that Americans do (Bouton, 1988). The instrument used in that
study followed a multiple choice format in which subjects were given a series of
situations, each containing a brief dialogue in which one of the utterances required
the use of implicature for it to be interpreted appropriately. Following each dialogue
was a set of four possible interpretations of that utterance from which the subjects
chose the one that most closely approximated the message the utterance conveyed.
This format was based on two assumptions: (1) that such items could be devel-
oped in which there was sufficient contextual information to permit American native
speakers (NS) to recognize and interpret the implicatures present in the dialogues,
and (2) that in each case, there was a single interpretation that most of those NS
would assign to the implicature involved.
Such assumptions, of course, needed to be tested. To do this, a pilot study was
conducted in which 60 American native Engish-speaking college students were
given situations containing dialogues like those described above. Each of the dia-
logues contained an utterance that subjects were not expected to be able to interpret
without the use of implicature. Subjects were then asked to put into their own words
what they thought that particular utterance meant in each case.
The results of the pilot study supported both assumptions it was designed to test.
They established beyond question that relatively simple contexts could be developed
for dialogues that would enable American NS to use implicature in interpreting
them. Futhermore, the interpretation that the American subjects gave for each of the
 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167 159

various utterances showed a remarkable consistency for the most part, and items for
which this was not true were discarded or revised and tested again. The results of
this pilot study were then incorporated into a multiple choice instrument with the
dominant NS response for each item being used as the correct answer. At the same
time, the set of situations given to the NS was also given to 79 NNS and the most
frequently given responses that differed from those of most of the NS were used as
distracters for the various multiple choice items.
Once the multiple choice instrument, which we will refer to as the implicature test
or the ZMPLC, was ready, it was administered to 436 international students on their
arrival on campus at the University of Illinois in late August of 1986. When the
results from the study were in, it was found that the NNS had arrived at the same
interpretation of the implicatures as the American NS only about 79% of the time.’
Furthermore, these results were supported by replications of the study 5 and 12
months later. It was apparent that, as Keenan had suggested in 1976, the use of
implicature in cross-cultural interaction was a potential barrier to effective commu-
nication. That, in turn, suggested that developing NNS skill in the interpretation of
English language implicatures should be one of the objectives of the ESL classroom.
However, a review of the latest ESL texts available in 1989 uncovered very few
instances in which any real attempt was made in this direction (Bouton, 1990). And
this led naturally to two related questions: If NNS are not systematically taught to
interpret implicatures in English, do they learn to do so effectively on their own?
And, if so, how long does it take for those living in the United States to reach a point
where their interpretations are not significantly different from those of American NS
with whom they must interact?

2. The present study - A longitudinal investigation

To discover the answer to these questions, it was necessary to find subjects who
had taken the IMPLC several years earlier. These subjects could then be given the
same test again and their scores compared to see to what extent their interpretations
of the implicatures had become more like those of the American NS with the passage
of time.

2.1. The 4’/2 year follow-up study

With this in mind, the first group of subjects selected for this follow-up study
consisted of those who had taken the test when it was first given in August, 1986,

’ The figure given in the original report of this study (Bouton, 1988) and elsewhere was 75% and was
based on the scores attained by NS and NNS over all 33 items on the original test. However, over time,
5 items have proved to be unreliable. As a result, those 5 are now treated as distracters when the test is
given; in effect, we now treat the instrument as a 28-item test. The 79% figure derived from calculations
based on these 28 items is more in keeping with the comparable statistic derived from the results of a
second test developed later and used in the 17-month study reported on later in this paper.
160 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167

so as to provide the longest possible time for the learning to have taken place. How-
ever, of the 436 international students involved in the original study in 1986, only
60 were still on campus in January, 1991; of these, 30 agreed to take part in the fol-
low-up.
The test battery used was exactly the same as the one that the subjects had taken
as an English placement test when they first arrived on campus, even though a
revised version of the IMPLC had been developed and used as early as August 1990.
The reason for using the 1986 version of the IMPLC rather than the more recent one
was our desire to avoid the possibility that differences between the scores achieved
by the NNS on the IMPLC in 1986 and 1991 exam might be related to differences
in the tests themselves rather than to the growth (or regression) of the NNS in their
ability to interpret the implicatures as the American NS did.
In addition to the IMPLC, there was also a structure test, a dictation, and a cloze
text; these last three components we will refer to collectively as the English Place-
ment Test (EPT). The primary reason for administering the entire battery of tests
again instead of using only the IMPLC this time was that we wanted to provide a
measure of the subject’s overall growth in English proficiency against which to
compare any increase in his/her ability to interpret implicatures. To our surprise,
however, there proved to be little meaningful correlation between the scores
achieved on the IMPLC test and those on the EPT as a whole - or on any of its
three components. This had been true in 1986, when correlation values ranged from
0.0309 between the IMPLC test and the dictation component to 0.3683 between the
IMPLC and the cloze test. And the correlation between the IMPLC and the EPT as
a whole at that time was only 0.3 134. But we had thought that perhaps a consider-
able growth in the NNS linguistic proficiency over the 4’/, years might have been
accompanied by a comparable growth in implicature skills. However, in 1991, the
correlation between the IMPLC and the various components remained insignifi-
cant: that between the IMPLC and the EPT as a whole, for example, was only
0.3183 (see Table 1).

Table 1
Comparison of EPT and IMPLC scores for NNS (4’,$-year study - 1986 testing)

Structure Cloze Dictation Composite IMPLC

Structure 1.0000 0.4344 0.1129 0.6632 0.3 159

0.0 0.0164 0.5525 0.000 1 0.0890
Cloze 0.4344 1 .oooo 0.2346 0.74374 0.36832
0.0164 0.0 0.2119 0.0001 0.0452
Dictation O? 11290 0.23467 1.oooo 0.71332 0.03085
0.5525 0.2119 0.0 0.0001 0.8714
Composite,, 0.66326 0.74374 0.7133 1.oooo 0.31343
0.0001 0.000 1 0.000 1 0.0 0.0917
IMPLC 0.31590 0.36832 0.03085 0.31343 1.oooo
0.0890 0.0452 0.87 14 0.0917 0.0

Pearson Corr. Coeff.: Prob > R under Ho: Rho=O/N=30

 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Prapatics 22 (1994) 157-167 161

The background and skills needed by an international student in order to interpret

English implicatures as Americans do apparently differ from those needed to per-
form effectively on dictation, cloze and structure tests. And so, one thing seems
fairly certain at this point: we cannot measure a person’s ability to interpret impli-
cature by using a general language proficiency test like the EPT.
As for the effect of the time the NNS subjects had spent living in an English-
speaking environment on their ability to interpret implicatures in American English,
it was clear that the NNS had made considerable progress over the 4’h years between
the tests. Although there was still a significant difference between the performance
of the NS and that of the NNS in 1991 for the test as a whole (p > O.OlS), it was less
than it had been in 1986 (p > 0.0001) (see Table 2).

Table 2
Comparing IMPLC test scores (4’/,-year study)

NNS NNS NS
Aug ‘86 Jan ‘91 Aug ‘86

No. of items 28 28 28
Mean score 19.97 22.97 25.11
Std. Dev. 3.55 2.96 1.77
Reliability 0.630 0.621 0.859
Range of raw Scores lo-26 13-28 21-28

N 30 30 28

Furthermore, in 1991, for 20 items on the IMPLC, the performance of the NS and
NNS was essentially the same; when the score of the NS and NNS on these items
are taken together and compared statistically, there is no significant difference (p >
0.3056). By contrast, when the subjects had first taken the test in 1986, a compari-
son of the scores of these two groups for those same 20 items did produce a statisti-
cally significant difference (p > 0.0001); that first time, the performance of the NS
and NNS could be said to be essentially the same on only 5 of the 20 items. Clearly
the scope of the difference between NS and NNS interpretations of implicature had
greatly diminished over the subjects’ 4’/, years of residence in the U.S.
Finally, in 1986, the difference between NS and NNS interpretations seemed quite
systematic. Whole sets of implicatures could be found that seemed to be more diffi-
cult for the NNS to interpret than they were for the NS. Examples of three of these
are given in the following items: understated criticism (l), implicatures involving a
sequence of events (2), and the Pope Q implicature (3), which is described below.
The answer selected by most American native speakers of English is indicated with
an asterisk in each of these examples.

(1) Understated criticism. Two teachers are talking about a student’s paper.
Mr. Ranger: Have you finished with Mark’s term paper yet?
Mr. Ryan: Yes, I have. I read it last night.
162 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Prapatics 22 (1994) 157-167

Mr. Ranger: What did you think of it?

Mr. Ryan: Well, I thought it was well typed.

How did Mr. Ryan like Mark’s term paper?

a. He liked it; he thought it was good.
b. He thought is was important that the paper was well typed.
c. He really hadn’t read it well enough to know.
*d. He did not like it.

(2) Sequence. Two friends, Maria and Tony, are talking about what had happend
the night before. They had had dinner with Sandy, a friend of theirs, in a little
town just outside Philadelphia. Then, after dinner, Sandy had left. Now, this
morning, Maria and Tony are trying to figure out what Sandy did after he left
them.
Maria: Hey, I hear Sandy went to Philadelphia and stole a car after he left us
last night.
Tony: Not exactly. He stole a car and went to Philadelphia.
Maria: Are you sure? That’s not the way I heard it.

What actually happened is that Sandy stole the car in Philadelphia itself. In that
case, which of the two friends has the right story - Maria or Tony?
*a. Maria
b. Tony
c. Both are right. Since they are both saying essentially the same thing, they
really have nothing to argue about.
d. Neither of them has the story right.

(3) POPE Q implicature. Two roommates are talking about their plans for the
summer.
Fran: My mother wants me to stay home for a while, so I can be there when our
relatives come to visit us at the beach.
Joan: Do you have a lot of relatives?
Fran: Are there flies in the summertime?

How can we best interpret Fran’s question?

a. Fran thinks her relatives are noisy.
b. Fran is new to the area and is trying to find out what the summers are like.
*c. Fran has a lot of relatives.
d. Fran is trying to change the subject; she doesn’t want to talk about her
relatives.

In the third example given here, Fran’s response to Joan’s question follows the
prototype of such responses, i.e., Is the Pope Catholic?, from which this implicature
 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167 163

gets its name.2 Such responses are somewhat flippant and superficially irrelevant.
However, the answer to the second question is always to be taken as being the same
as the answer to the first (usually yes3), and the fact that the answer to the second is
obvious is intended to suggest that the answer to the first should be as well. In this
case, for instance, Fran intends Joan to realize that she does have lots of relatives, as
surely as and perhaps to the extent that there are flies in the summertime.
By 1991, however, none of these types of implicature that were troublesome for
the NNS in 1986 were consistently causing trouble. The only items that were still
causing trouble were related to specific points of American culture in the substance
of the test item and not to the type of implicature involved, and in that sense, the
problems caused by these items were arbitrary and idiosyncratic. Consider (4), for
example.

(4) Relevance Maxim. Bill and Peter have been good friends since they were chil-
dren. They roomed together in college and traveled Europe together after gradu-
ation. Now friends have told Bill that they saw Peter dancing with Bill’s wife
while Bill was away.
Bill: Peter knows how to be a really good friend.

Which of the following best says what Bill means?

*a. Peter is not acting the way a good friend should.
b. Peter and Bill’s wife are becoming really good friends while Bill is away.
c. Peter is a good friend and so Bill can trust him.
d. Nothing should be allowed to interfere with their friendship.

Only half of the NNS thought that (a) was the best interpretation of Bill’s remark
in 1991, while 84% of the American NS interpreted the remark that way. And
though this 50% figure represents a significant increase over the 33% choosing that
interpretation in 1986, there were still a great many NNS who understood Peter’s
remark differently from the way that most of the Americans did. On both occasions,
those NNS who did not choose (a) in responding to (4) chose (C), which seems to be
based on an entirely different attitude towards marriage and friendship.
In short, a comparison of the results attained by the NNS in 1986 and 1991 shows
that although NNS interpreted implicatures differently from their NS counterparts
21% of the time when they first arrived in the United States in 1986, those differ-
ences had greatly diminished after 4’/2 years: (1) the number of items that were inter-
preted differently was greatly reduced, and (2) there was no longer any specific type
of implicature that was, in itself, a serious problem for the NNS. To a considerable

The Q in POPE Q stands for Question. We have used this label throughout this study because when
we first decided to include this type of implicature among those tested, we found that although it was
widely used and recognized, no one had given it a name by which it could be easily identified.
i Although they appear less often, questions to which the answer is NO can also be the basis of a
POPE Q implicature. An example would be the response of a totally bald detective on a television show
who, when asked if he needed help in performing a particular assignment, said, “Do I need a haircut?”
164 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167

extent, the effective interpretation of implicatures in American English does seem to

be something that NNS can learn over a period as long as 4’/, years - even when they
are offered no systematic instruction designed to help them in that direction.
But how fast does this learning happen? Are the relevant skills and background
knowledge picked up quickly - during their first year or two in the English-speaking
country? Or is it a longer process - one that takes nearly the full 41/2 years to
mature?

2.2. The 17-month follow-up study

To answer that question, we repeated the follow-up study that we had done with
the 41/2 -year residents with another group of subjects who had been in the United
States only 17 months. This time, however, we used a modified version of the
IMPLC test, one that had first been used in August, 1990, when these students first
arrived on campus and which differed from the original in four ways: (1) the num-
ber of items was reduced from 33 to 25 to shorten the time involved in taking the
test; (2) items that had proved to be of questionable validity over the 4 years since
the test was developed were removed or repaired; (3) two items based on the POPE
Q implicature and one based on an example used by Levinson (1983) to illustrate the
term scalar implicature (Gazdar, 1979) were added to permit us to study more effec-
tively the ability of the NNS to interpret these two specific types of implicatures;
and (4) three items not involving implicature were included as distracters.
When this revised version of the test was first administered in August, 1990, the
number of students involved included 304 NNS, as well as a control group of 77
NS American university students. Then 17 months later, in January, 1992, the
same test was given to a randomly selected sample of 34 subjects from among
those of the original 304 who were still on campus to see whether their responses
had become more like those of the NS than they had been 17 months earlier in
1990. The two sets of scores of this random sample of NNS (from August, 1990,
and January, 1992) are given in Table 3, along with those of the NS used as the
norm.

Table 3
Comparing IMPLC test scores (17-month study)

NNS NNS NS
Aug ‘90 Jan ‘92 Aug ‘90

No. of items 22 22 22
Mean score 16.50 18.06 19.92
Std. Dev. 2.96 3.11 1.54
Reliability 0.655 0.739 0.321
Range of raw scores 9-21 9-22 15-22

N 34 34 77
 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167 165

As might be expected, a comparison of the scores made by the random sample in

1990 and 1992 showed that the subjects had become more proficient in their inter-
pretation of implicatures to a statistically significant degree (p > T = 0.0001). How-
ever, though the difference between the scores of the NNS and the NS had decreased
over that period, they were still significantly different (p > T = 0.019). The NNS had
improved their skills, though they were not yet native-like. Still, these measurements
are rather crude. A clearer picture of the progress these NNS had made can be
obtained by looking at the results related to specific items and sets of items, just as
we did when studying the results achieved by the NNS who had been in the United
States for 4% years.
The first thing we noticed about this test as a whole was that its questions could be
divided into two equal sets, with 11 questions in each. For the first of these two sets,
the performance of the NS and NNS was essentially the same in both 1990 and 1992
(see Table 1). When these 11 questions are analyzed as if they were an independent
unit, the mean raw score for the NS was 10; that for the NNS was 9.852 - both times.
Six of these 11 questions are based on Grice’s Relevance Maxim and include
items such as those in (5), which nearly all NS and NNS interpreted as expected.

(5) Relevance Maxim. Frank wanted to know what time it was, but he didn’t have
a watch.
Frank: What time is it, Helen?
Helen: The postman has been here.
Frank: Okay. Thanks.

What message does Frank probably get from what Helen says?
*a. She is telling him approximately what time it is by telling him that the post-
man has already been there.
b. By changing the subject, Helen is telling Frank that she doesn’t know what
time it is.
c. She thinks that Frank should stop what he is doing and read his mail.
d. Frank will not be able to interpret any message from what Helen says, since
she did not answer his question.

Another type of implicature on which the performance of the two groups was
essentially the same was that modeled after what Levinson (1983: 132f.) includes
under the term scalar implicature, but might better be known as the Minimum
Requirement Implicature (Bouton, 1989). It occurs when a person is asked how
many cows he has - or whether she has a certain amount of money or a certain grade
point average - in a context in which it is clear that the inquirer does not really want
to know an exact number. Rather, the speaker wants to know whether the other per-
son has a certain minimum amount - enough to reach a minimum requirement of
some sort. An example of this type of implicature is given in (6).

(6) Scalar Maxim. Nigel Brown is a dairy farmer and needs to borrow money to
build a new barn. When he goes to the bank to apply for the loan, the banker
166 L.F. Bouton /Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167

tells him that he must have at least 50 cows on his farm in order to borrow
enough money to build a new barn. The following conversation then occurs:
Banker: Do you have 50 cows, Mr. Brown?
Nigel : Yes I do.

Which of the following says exactly what Nigel means?

a. He has exactly 50 cows - no more, no less.
*b. He has at least 50 cows - maybe more.
c. He has no more than 50 cows - maybe less.
d. He could mean any of these three things.

The expected interpretation here according to Levinson would be (b). However,

this item proved somewhat more difficult than those based on the Relevance Maxim,
which we have just been discussing, for both NS and NNS alike: only 81% of the
NS interpreted Nigel’s comment as expected, 79% of the NNS in 1990, and 74% of
the NNS in 1992 - and the results from the other items on the test that were based
on this Minimum Requirement Implicature were much the same. Yet, even though
they are more difficult, these items belong in this first set of questions because the
percent of both NS and NNS answering these items by using the implicature effec-
tively was essentially the same.
Taken together, the 3 scalar items and the 6 items based on Grice’s Relevance
Maxim account for all but two of those on which NS and NNS performance was
essentially the same. The other two items were idiosyncratic.
We turn now to the second set of 11 items - those on which NS and NNS per-
formed quite differently. NS interpreted these items as expected almost as frequently
as those in the set we have just been discussing, earning a mean score for this sec-
ond set of 9.82 as compared with 10 for the first set. The NNS, however, found these
much more difficult, with mean scores of only 6.617 in 1990 and 8.29 in 1991.
But there is something more important than just the difference in scores here. The
implicatures on which the items in this second set are based belong to 4 discernable
types, all of which have been illustrated earlier: indirect criticism in (l), a sequence
implicature in (2), the Pope Q in (3), and irony in (4). This indicates that for these
subjects, who have been in the U.S. for 17 months, the implicatures themselves, and
not just the culture points on which particular items were based, were still a barrier
to effective cross-cultural communication. And though these NNS were significantly
more effective in handling the dialogues after the 17 months, all of the implicature
types that were obstacles to understanding in 1990 remained so in 1992. None of
these implicature types had been mastered by these NNS at that point.

3. What a comparison of the results from the two studies tells us

The last fact just mentioned - that the 17-month group had mastered none of the
types of implicature that bothered them when they first arrived - is important. It pro-
vides us with a definitive characteristic that distinguishes the proficiency of the 17-
 L.F. Bouton I Journal of Pragmatics 22 (1994) 157-167 167

month group from those who had been in the U.S. for 4Y2years. For that latter group,
though some types of implicatures had been a problem when they first arrived in the
United States, none of those implicature types were particularly problematic 4’/*
years later. By that time, those subjects had gained a reasonable mastery over all of
the different implicature types that had proved so difficult for them initially. The
only items with which they still had difficulty seemed idiosyncratic in the sense that
there was no common thread linking them together. Each item missed after 4l/* years
was simply linked to a specific culture point with which the subjects were not yet
familiar.
From the comparison of the effectiveness of these two groups of NNS in inter-
preting implicatures with which they were faced, we can see that if given the oppor-
tunity to live in an English-speaking community like the U.S. long enough - say 4%
years - NNS should become quite proficient and implicatures will no longer form
any systematic barrier to their understanding. But we also see that the process is a
long one - that what was difficult for the NNS initially was still difficult for the
group that had been in the U.S. just 17 months. Unguided learning in this area of
cross-cultural communication seems slow. And though the number of objectives
established for our ESL programs seems to be constantly growing, the systematic
development of NNS skills necessary to the use of implicature in English seems to
be another that needs to be given some attention. If Green (1989) is right and impli-
cature is ‘completely ordinary and unremarkable’, such attention would seem essen-
tial to any program intended to shorten the time needed by NNS to become affective
communicators in English.

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