The present study uses a cross-sectional design in order to systematically investigate interlanguage pragmatic performance and to shed more light on L2 pragmatic development. It analyses and compares learners’ production across three proficiency levels, and examines whether learners who receive classroom instruction in a FL context show pragmalinguistic development in making requests as their English language proficiency improves. The data are collected through interactive role-plays and the analysis focuses on request head acts, internal modification, and request perspective. The results suggest that, although there is some development with increasing proficiency, even the advanced learners’ performance lags far behind native speakers in the pragmatic areas examined. The study identified specific stages in the development of learners’ requests; however, the predominance of directness across all levels and the reversed developmental trend of request perspective pointed towards the influence of the L1 on the learners’ pragmalinguistic performance, particularly in the foreign language context.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum uses data from young children’s communicative development to argue that metaphor and metonymy rely on different pragmatic mechanisms. Metaphor and metonymy do have certain characteristics in common: they both target individual words or phrases, they both contribute content to the proposition explicitly expressed, and they both lie on a continuum of literal and figurative uses. However, developmental data suggests that early metonymic uses may be the result of a more basic process than metaphorical uses, one in which the child exploits salient associative relations to compensate for gaps in vocabulary.

In this chapter, Myrto Grigoroglou and Anna Papafragou explore what seems to be a paradox about the development of pragmatic abilities: while very young children are able to perform tasks which demonstrate what is required for pragmatic reasoning, certain areas of their pragmatic performance do not become adult-like until much later. Focusing on the much-discussed topic of scalar implicature, they propose that performance in tasks designed to elicit the derivation of such an implicature is significantly affected by the nature of the contextual material provided. When, for example, children appear not to understand an utterance of the form ‘some X are Y’ as suggesting ‘not all X are Y’, it may be because they have not seen the potential relevance in the particular context of the thought that all X are Y.

Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum uses data from young children’s communicative development to argue that metaphor and metonymy rely on different pragmatic mechanisms. Metaphor and metonymy do have certain characteristics in common: they both target individual words or phrases, they both contribute content to the proposition explicitly expressed, and they both lie on a continuum of literal and figurative uses. However, developmental data suggests that early metonymic uses may be the result of a more basic process than metaphorical uses, one in which the child exploits salient associative relations to compensate for gaps in vocabulary.