impact of pragma-linguistic & socio-pragmatic components on understanding English pragmatic utterances

Abstract

Having a good pragmatic competence prevent the interlocutors from misunderstanding. The native and non-native people encounter everyday a lot of pragmatic utterances need to be inferred correctly to catch the intended meaning. The non-native people face a lot of difficulties in conveying hidden messages behind the letteral lines. Leech’s pragmatic components which are pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic, are so important especially for non-natives to develop in order to help them having a competence gathers the linguistic elements and the socio-cultural conventions and beliefs of English culture which will eliminate the obscure of the pragmatic utterances. This research studies the theoretical view of pragmatics and leech’s components as well as analyzing answers of Iraqi students inferring some of pragmatic samples taken from the real British life. The study concludes that there is a lack in pragmatic competence for those students as well as a fuzzy knowledge of Leech’s two components.