L2 Acquisition of Gradable Adjectives at the Semantics-pragmatics Interface

The present research investigates L2 acquisition of gradable adjectives at the semantics-pragmatics interface and explores the role of the culture-specific factor ‘face’ in L2 interpretation of gradable adjectives under negation. The study included two acceptability judgment tasks and the results showed that L2 speakers were native-like in interpreting gradable adjectives under negation without a context (Experiment 1). However, L2 speakers were affected by the realization of face in processing gradable adjectives with face-threatening contexts (Experiment 2). This paper hopes to provide insights for L2 research on the semantics-pragmatics interface and L2 speakers’ capability of deriving pragmatic inferences.