A Study Of Pragmatic Failures Committed By Chinese Students In English Greetings

Sociolinguists view tl1at the regular interactions are identified in some speech acts.R.A.Huddson (I980) assumes that every language has a range of forms for use as greetingsand farewells, which are very il11portant in intercomInunication and are compared to "entries"and "exits". ln recent years, many scho1ars both at home and abroad have made enormousinvestigations on greetings (Krivonos and Knapp, l975, Qian Housheng, l994, etc..), butthey haven't discussed tIle linguistic routineegreetings in Gross-culturaI communication. Infact, because of cultural difTerel1ces, various misunderstandings occur here and there incross-cultural communication. And studies show that pragmatic failure is the basic source formost of those misunderstandings. According to Thomas (l983), pragmatic failure occurs notbecause of grammatical inaccuracy or incorrect usage of vocabulary items, but because ofimproper expressions or unacceptable ways of speaking in a particu1ar situation so that thespeaker cannot accomplish l1is/her purposes. Unti1 now there have been many linguists andschoIars who have studied the cross-culturaI pragmatic fai1ures committed by ChineseIearners of English in speech acts & realization (Helen Oatey l987, He Ziran, l986, etc..).These speech acts inc1ude addressing people, greetings, conversation topics, visiting someone,thanking and leave-taki11g, etc.. Grcetings are the most frequently used speech act in sociaIinteraction, and tend to be ignored by our Cl1inese speakers. There has been no systematicstudy of pragmatic failures committed by Chinese students in English greetings.' Consequently the present study aims to undertake such an overaIl study in terms of JennyThomas's theoretical framework of cross-cuItural pragmatic faiIure.According to Thomas' research, pragmatic faiIure can be classified into two types fpragmlinguistic failure and sociopragmtic faiIure. Sl1e (l983f99) says tl1at pragmalinguisticfaiIure occurs when the pragmatic force n1apped by speakers onto a given utterance issystematically different from the fOrce most frequently assigned to it by native speakers of thetarget language, or when speech act strategies are inappropriately transferred from onelanguage to anothef, and that sociopragmic failure stems from cross-culturaIIy differentperceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior. The author thinks thatThomas' theory of pragmatic failure is quite reasonable and assumes that the Chinese studentsalso commit pragma1inguistic failure and sociopragmatic faiIure when they meet and greet thenative speaker. Tl1us the author makes an investigation to test the pragmatic failurescommitted by Chinese students in Englisl1 greetings. The questionnaire consists of twotypes---Multiple CI1oice (MC) and True or False Judgment (TFJ). The MC is provided withone situation with two or fOur utterances UI1der11eath, and all the subjects are required tochoose the most appropriate utterance in that situation. The materia1s are se1ected according tothe author's own experiences and severa1 reference books. 50 subjects invo1ved in theinvestigation are selected from the first year college students of the foreign languagesdepartment of GuangXi Normal University. These subjects have experienced 5 to 6 years ofnormal education in middle scl1ools, having certain linguistic competence. Based on theresults, we can at 1east afford evidence for the following f1 1 ll. Having confirmed that pragmatic failures committed by Chinese students in Englishgreetings can be classified into what Thomas (l983) terms as two types fpragmalinguistic faiIure and sociopragmatic faiIure. The average rate is 29. l4% and36. l4% respectiveIy,2. Having discovered another type of pragmatic failureestrategy-pragmatic failure. Theaverage rate is 43%. Both Brown&Levinson (l978, l987) and Leech (l983) aim at atheory that can be app1ied universaIly to deal with politeness. Howevef,Brown&Levinson's notion...