A Study On Pragmatic Failure In China-Japan Business Communication

With the further development of China’s reform and opening up,the trade and cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries are more and more frequent.Foreign language as a tool plays a more and more important role in intercultural communication.With the increasing development of international communication,communication breakdowns and pragmatic failures are on the rise.Pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication has been widely concerned by linguists both at home and abroad.Since the term of "pragmatic failure" was first proposed by Jenny Thomas(1983:97)in her article "Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure",the research on pragmatic failure,especially cross-cultural pragmatic failure,has a growing interest in pragmatics field and applied linguistics field.Since then,a lot of researchers at home and abroad have made their contributions to the research and have conducted a number of empirical studies to verify and support it.But most of previous pragmatic failure studies involved the daily speeches and a few studies researched the pragmatic failures in international business communication;Chinese scholars’researches mainly concentrated on the pragmatic failures in Chinese-English communications,while a small number of researches involved pragmatic failures between Chinese and other foreign languages,especially between Chinese and Japanese.In this thesis,the author intends to conduct a study on pragmatic failures in China-Japan business communication and try to find out the causes for the pragmatic failures and make some suggestions for the improvement of pragmatic competence in cross-cultural communication and the cultivation of pragmatic competence in foreign language teaching.This thesis first attempts to review the literatures of pragmatic failure and present some previous studies on pragmatic failure which had been conducted in China and abroad.And the related literatures of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication will also be reviewed as the other parts of the theoretical background of the present study.Then,the author intends to categorize,present and analyze some examples of pragmatic failures collected from four participants’ real work experiences in China-Japan business communication in Kanji’s meaning,ambiguous expression and respectful expression.And the result shows that the main cause for such pragmatic failures is:although these participants have good proficiency in Japanese,they are lack of sufficient pragmatic knowledge and cultural knowledge.To avoid pragmatic failure,improve communicative competence and achieve success in cross-cultural communication,the author believes that mastering of a foreign language is not only mastering of the language knowledge but also attaching importance to pragmatic knowledge and cultural knowledge in the meantime.For the improvement of pragmatic competence in cross-cultural communication,the author’s suggestions are:enhancing cultural awareness and enhancing pragmatic awareness;for the cultivation of pragmatic competence in foreign language teaching,the suggestions are:raising teacher’s competence,teaching culture and pragmatic knowledge,enhancing learner’s awareness.