A Survey On Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failures Committed By Chinese Non-English Major Students In English Address Forms

Address form is an important sociolinguistic phenomenon. As an important part ofsocial etiquette, appropriate address behavior is crucial for effective communicationand successful maintenance of interpersonal relationships. The status and distance canbe indicated by address forms. Because of the deep disparities between Eastern andWestern cultures, undoubtedly great differences exist between Chinese and Englishaddress forms. Thus various pragmatic failures occur in cross-cultural communication.According to Thomas (1983), cross-cultural pragmatic failures occur not because ofgrammatical inaccuracy or incorrect usage of vocabulary items, but because ofimproper expressions or unacceptable ways of speaking in a particular situation sothat the speaker cannot accomplish his/her purposes. Until now, there have been manylinguists and scholars who have studied the cross-cultural pragmatic failurescommitted by Chinese learners of English in speech acts. But these studies are verygeneral, that is, researchers studied pragmatic failures from many aspects rather thanfocusing on one point. Therefore, few works and papers have specially concerned theanalysis of pragmatic failures in English address forms. Under the circumstance, thisthesis attempts to investigate the pragmatic failures committed by Chinesenon-English major students in English address forms and find out the causes of thesefailures in order to help Chinese non-English major students have a betterunderstanding of English address forms.The author makes a questionnaire, which is modified from Chen Xiafang's (1998),and an interview to test the pragmatic failures committed by Chinese non-Englishmajor students in English address forms. The questionnaire takes the form of multiplechoices, including 15 questions each of which has four choices underneath. All thesubjects are required to choose the most appropriate answer to each question. In theinvestigation, there are 250 subjects who are selected from the third year collegestudents of non-English majors of Shandong Institute of Arts and Music, and in theinterview 50 subjects are selected from the third year college students of non-Englishmajors of Shandong University of Architecture and Engineering.This thesis employs both quantitative approach and qualitative approach. Negativetransfer is mainly applied as the basic theory, meanwhile Gu Yueguo's PolitenessPrinciple, Brown and Gilman's Power and Solidarity and the relationship betweenlanguage and culture are also used, which are closely related to address forms. Basedon the analyses, it is revealed that:(1) Pragmatic failures are easily committed by non-English major students, andthe most direct reason is negative transfer caused by the differences between Chineseand English cultures.(2) There are some differences between English and Chinese address forms in theuse of kinship terms, given names and titles.It is hoped that the present study can enhance Chinese non-English major students'awareness on the appropriate use of address forms in cross-cultural communicationand provide some implications for foreign language teaching. Here, the author makessome constructive suggestions on how to help students avoid pragmatic failures.English teachers should offer students more knowledge about English culturalbackground, social conventions, and history in the teaching process so that they mightavoid pragmatic failures to a great extent in cross-cultural communication. In order tohelp Chinese students acquire sound linguistic and communicative competence, andsuccessfully participate in international communication, English teachers shouldcultivate students' cultural awareness and creativity. Besides, some pragmaticknowledge and the differences of Chinese and English taboos should be introduced inforeign language teaching to avoid pragmatic failures in cross-culturalcommunication.