Pragmatic Failure Of Chinese College Students In English Speech Act Of Gratitude

Jenny Thomas (1983) first advanced the term"pragmatic failure"and the two areas within it― pragma-linguistic failure and socio-pragmatic failure."Pragmatic failure", as Thomas pointed out, refers to"the inability to understand what is meant by what is said in a given context". As Thomas puts it,"while grammatical error may reveal a speaker to be a less than proficient language-user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him or her as a person."Therefore, it can be said safely that to a certain degree, pragmatic failure is much more serious than grammatical error. Thus, pragmatic failure should be given attentive consideration. It is worthwhile making efforts to explore pragmatic failure so that students can better their communicative competence and achieve their goals when they are in interaction with native speakers. Pragmatic failure occurs frequently in the speech of Chinese college students.Since the expression of gratitude occurs frequently among native American speakers and has high social value, it is important that non-native speakers perform this function appropriately. Additionally, under the enlightenment of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), this thesis aims to explore the pragmatic failure of Chinese college students in English speech act of gratitude by delivering questionnaires to 200 college non-English major students in Jilin University.On the analysis of research data, it is found that certain pragmatic failures are made by the Chinese college students, and there is little evidence of either prama-linguistic or socio-pragmatic competence differences across the two groups of Chinese college students chosen from second year and fourth year non-English...