ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the acquisition of pragmatic competencies in a second language. It explains that even though second language learners can use their universal cognitive abilities to enrich the linguistic meaning of utterances in a foreign language, they still experience difficulties in many areas of pragmatic competencies due to the necessity to integrate culture-specific knowledge as input to inferential processes. In addition, at lower levels of proficiency, lack of linguistic knowledge also prevents learners from making the correct form-function mappings. The chapter presents evidence that transfer effects play an important role for second language learner's ability to understand and use pragmatic skills in a second language and that the development of pragmatic skills does benefit from explicit teaching strategies, especially when patterns can be generalized. The cognitive abilities involved for understanding figurative language are universal and carried over from the learner's first to their second languages.
