ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how hearers construct understandings of messages. Historically, it situates understanding in Grice’s (1975/1989) conversational implicature and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986, 1995) relevance theory, showing how these foundational works informed several pragmatic studies that investigated L2 learners’ pragmatic abilities in inferencing implicature in conversation. The chapter also focuses on pragmatic conventionalization, the notion of appropriateness, and metapragmatics, and makes recommendations for future studies that examine pragmatic comprehension and perception.
