The Study Of Pragmatic Failure-An Adaptation Approach

Pragmatic failure arouses unpleasant feelings or even inflammation between participants and brings breakdown to communication: as a result, it severely holds back the communication between people. The study of pragmatic failure begins with Jenny Thomas who published her Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure in 1983. In this article, she first proposes the notion of pragmatic failure, classifies pragmatic failure into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure, and explores the causes to both pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. She also calls on linguists and foreign language teachers to investigate the causes to pragmatic failure. From that time on. many scholars at home and abroad have begun to contribute a great deal of effort in this field. However, there are some defects in those researches.This dissertation reviews what have been done in this field and finds out the defects of the researches. That is, most of the researches are confined to the study of cross-cultural pragmatic failure, neglecting the study of intra-cultural pragmatic failure; most researchers investigate pragmatic failure only from the perspective of the speaker, without taking the hearer into account; and moreover, the pragmatic failures studied are only those that take place in speech act level, while those that take place in intonation and discourse level are neglected. And then it offers a new approach to investigate the causes to pragmatic failure including intra-cultural pragmatic failure and inter-cultural pragmatic failure, making use of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, taking both speaker and hearer into consideration. According to Adaptation Theory, using language involves continuous linguistic choice-making, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal and/or language-external reasons. In the process of making linguistic choices, structural objects and contextual correlates should be adapted to each other. Furthermore, the choices are made both in producing and interpreting an utterance, and both types of choice-making are equally important. Thatis to say, language users, i.e. both speaker/utterer and hearer/interpreter have to adapt structural objects to contextual correlates and make proper linguistic choices. However, not all language users can successfully make adaptation and make appropriate linguistic choices. This thesis explores what language users unconsciously fail to adapt to when making pragmatic failure, and finds out the causes to pragmatic failure. That is to say, in the process of linguistic choice-making, language users" unconsciously failure to make adaptation to communicative context and language reality causes pragmatic failure. To be more exact, when language users fail to make adaptation to the interpreters that are present, ingredients of mental world, such as personality traits, emotions, patterns of beliefs or value systems, intentions, social conventions and cultural conventions in the social world, for instance, ethnicity and race, nationality, linguistic group, level of education, social relationship, gender, religion, age. and so on; or when language users fail to adapt to the linguistic rules guiding the use of that language, they will cause the communication to break down or end in failure without achieving the expected communicative effects.Finding out what causes pragmatic failure, this dissertation proposes some measures to be taken so as to reduce or avoid the occurrence of pragmatic failure. For language users, in order to reduce or avoid pragmatic failure, they should pay attention to the communicative context in which language is used and linguistic rules guiding the use of the language they are using in the communication, and make conscious adaptation to the contextual correlates and linguistic rules, and should also increase their pragmatic empathy. As for foreign language teaching, foreign language teachers should try their best to help students to cultivate their pragmatic competence by providing authentic teaching materials, integrating foreign lan...