Pragmatics, Grammar and Meaning in SLA

This Element is a comprehensive, state-of-the-science treatment of L2 acquisition with different language combinations. It discusses facts critically from various theoretical perspectives, explores teaching and pedagogic practices, and confirms that interface-conditioned semantic and pragmatic competence is acquired later.

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This Element explores the role of pragmatics, and its relationship with meaning and grammar, in second language acquisition. Specifically, this Element examines the generative paradigm, with its focus on purely linguistic aspects, in contrast with, and complemented by, the view of language adopted in the wider perspective on communication that Relevance Theory offers. It reviews several theoretical standpoints on how linguistic phenomena that require combining semantic, pragmatic and syntactic information are acquired and developed in second languages, illustrating how these perspectives are brought together in analysing data in different linguistic scenarios. It shows that the notion of procedural meaning casts light on the range of interpretative effects of grammatical features and how they vary across languages, suggesting ways to complete the picture of the interface factors that affect second language development.