A Study Of Pragmatic Failures And Strategies In Cross-cultural Interview

Nowadays, with the modern world becoming a small multi-cultural global village, and with the people longing for information exchange as soon as possible, it really brings severe challenge to journalists to collect and transmit information quickly, truthfully and efficiently. In addition, how to enforce the understanding between the members of different cultures to make cross-cultural communication going on smoothly is an important task for the researchers in the fields of culture, linguistics, and communication.With globalization developing very fast, the development of journalism is dramatically improving in the resent years. Journalism communication is not only limited to local areas, but internationalized. The thesis takes cross-cultural interview as cultural context, which is based on linguistic characteristics and skills in cross-cultural interview, mainly makes researches on pragmatic failures caused by differences both on languages and cultures between Chinese and English, and pragmatic strategies which deal with pragmatic failures.The thesis is divided into five chapters:Chapter One generally introduces the reason to write the thesis.Chapter Two deals with the purpose and significance of the thesis, recent researches about the subject, and the methodology and data collection of the thesis.Chapter Three develops in two parts. First, it mainly lists linguistic characteristics at phonetic level, lexical level, syntactical level, and discoursal level; second, it analyzes interview skills including interruptive skills, interrogative skills, and evasive skills. Specifically speaking, interruptive skills are subdivided into four concrete skills: intervention interruption, deep-the-topic interruption, shifting-topic interruption, and interjection. Interrogation skills are important in cross-cultural interview, including"yes-no questions","WH-questions","alternative questions"and"Tag questions". Otherwise, evasive skills are adopted when interviewees face hostile and sensitive questions, especially in political interview.Chapter Four is the fundamental basis of the whole paper, and chiefly makes concrete example analyses of a large number of phenomena from the perspectives of phonetics, lexicon, syntax, and discourse. Moreover, it then analyzes the causes of pragmatic failures in cross-cultural interview, and causes including values and cultures, modes of thinking, and negative transfer.Chapter Five plays a vital role in the whole paper, which develops into four parts. First, it gives definitions on pragmatic strategies. In the following, it analyzes the pragmatic strategies with a large number of actual examples both on websites and television from conversational implicature, face-management politeness, and turn-taking, which are theoretical methods to research on cross-cultural interview. Specifically speaking, conversational implicature strategies are divided into standard conversational implicature and non-standard conversational implicature. Hence, the researches on face-management politeness strategies are from positive politeness strategy and negative politeness strategy. Turn-taking strategy is very important for interviewers to control the topics, and the study goes on from taking turns, discourse, and both opening and ending conversations.Although there are a large number of analyses of pragmatic failures and their causes, it only simply lists the phenomena of verbal communication from cultural aspect in daily life. Otherwise, verbal communication is virtually the application of pragmatic strategy. To some extent, the application of pragmatic strategy associated whether verbal communication succeeds or not. Hence, the research on pragmatic strategy is the core in pragmatics. The thesis puts the study of pragmatic failures and strategies under the framework of pragmatics, and expands the research to the news areas besides daily life, which makes the research both practically and theoretically.