Breaking the Quantity Rule: Exploring Gender Differences in Learners’ Responses to Gricean Maxim Violations

The impact of gender on Iraqi EFL learners' reactions toward the violation of Grices maxims is what this study seeks to investigate. Particularly, it explores male and female learners' reactions towards violations of the quantity maxim. In the current study, the pragmatic hypothesis is adopted as the model for analyzing the empirical data collected from one hundred Iraqi EFL male and female learners' responses to two types of sentence judgment tasks: binary and ternary. The tasks included conversational contexts that involved violations of the quantity maxim. The current study problem consists of two parts: (1) understanding how male and female EFL learners differ in their reaction towards pragmatically inappropriate language and (2) investigating such a subject it tries to fill the gap of knowledge concerning the difference between male and female learners behavior in such situation. It is hypothesized that female learners are more pragmatically flexible than male learners. Due to the numerical nature of the data, data analysis required a quantitative approach, namely, a statistical analysis using SPSS software. The results of the data analysis revealed that gender impacts pragmatic flexibility. The female learners were more pragmatically flexible than the male learners. Additionally, the results of the study indicated that a reverse relationship exists between pragmatic competence and pragmatic flexibility.