Unpacking Implicative and Aspectual Predicates: Iraqi Students’ Strategies of Interpreting Presupposition

Abstract

The present paper is an attempt to identify how Iraqi students pragmatically approach the presupposition of the two triggers: implicative predicates and aspectual predicates. It also intends to specify which strategies they utilize to do so, making out the causes behind their failure in arriving at the appropriate presuppositions. The subjects of the test are fifty Iraqi EFL university students in the fourth-year, Dept. of English, College of Arts, Mustansiriyah University, during the academic year 2021-2022. A diagnostic test is administered to the subjects to identify their pragma-linguistic abilities in providing suitable answers. The study concludes that the students find more difficulty in providing the presuppositions concerning implicative predicates than aspectual predicates. Elaborately, most of the students show a higher appeal in adopting resolution than accommodation and rejection strategies. Furthermore, the pragma-linguistic failure is linked to the fact that students are unable to connect grammatical knowledge to pragmatic knowledge to arrive at the intended meaning of the two triggers.