Sociopragmatic Failure: A Cross-cultural Perspective

Pragmatic failure is an important source of cross-cultural communication breakdown. It occurs whenever the communicator could not use language appropriately or interpret language correctly.There are two types of pragmatic failure: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure is language-specific, simply a question of highly conventionalized usage. It can be taught as part of grammar and corrected quite straightforwardly. As the reflection of the deeper socio-cultural differences, sociopragmatic failure is a far more delicate matter, which should not be corrected, but only pointed out and discussed. This paper will focus on sociopragmatic failure.Sociopragmatic failure is deeply rooted in culture. The most significant aspects of culture which affect the interactants' sociopragmatic decision-making are value system, politeness and face, functions of language and nonverbal communication. Cultures differ from each other in those aspects. Cultures involved in this paper are mainly Chinese culture and American culture.American individualism and Chinese collectivism each play decisive role in decision-making. Politeness is what people of different cultural backgrounds try to observe and maintain, but the actual ways to realize politeness and the standards for its judgment are not the same in Chinese culture and Western culture. Also, different cultures have distinctive ways of understanding the basic functions of language, whether language is used for information or relation, negotiation or ratification, group harmony or individual welfare. All the above factors bring about cross-cultural differences in communication, unaware of which Chinese learners of English hold the unquestioned assumption that their own ways of speaking are correct andproper. Sociopragmatic failure, therefore, is almost inevitable. Nonverbal signals compose part of contextual background, so they can't be neglected in cross-cultural communication.Participants' attitudes such as ethnocentrism, stereotypes and prejudice may also result in sociopragmatic failure.With understanding of cultural differences, we can increase shared knowledge for mutual understanding and observing the other's social and cultural custom in cross-cultural communication. Besides such background or encyclopedic knowledge, we should also be familiar with some information seeking strategies so as to get the specific knowledge of individuals we are encountering. Skills such as empathy, tolerance for ambiguity, behavioural flexibility, etc. are also important. All this will eventually help Chinese learners of English to communicate more effectively and appropriately in cross-cultural encounters.