Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure Analysis

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. In verbal communication, linguistic errors resulted from violation against grammatical rules are easily recognized. Listeners can understand the speakers with the help of context and their own linguistic knowledge. In this case, such linguistic errors basically will not impede the communication. However, compared with linguistic errors, pragmatic failures are much more implicit. When the speaker commits pragmatic failures with high linguistic proficiency, "a native speaker is likely to attribute his/her apparent impoliteness and unfriendliness, not to any linguistic deficiency, but to boorishness or ill-will." So "pragmatic failure reflects badly on him her as a person." (Thomas. 1983) And people who come from different cultures are fallible to commit pragmatic failures.There are two types of pragmatic failures: pragmalinguistic failure and sceiopragmatie Failure. Pragmalinguistic failure is language-specific. simply a question of highly conventionalized usage. It often occurs when language users misunderstand the connotations of words. misuse sentence structures and transfer speech acts from mother tongue to the target language. As the reflection of the deeper socio-cultural differences. sociopragmatic failures are a far more delicate matter, which cannot be corrected directly. Thus this thesis will focus on sociopragmatic failures.To analyze sociopragmatic failure. we should begin with its sources. In this thesis. I will discuss this question in three domains: culture. psychology and classroom teaching. Cultural differences arc the main source of sociopragmatic lailures. narrowed in pragmatic rules and social values. Taking American culture as the counterpart of Chinese culture. this thesis is trying to find the factors which influence people's sociopragmatic decision-making from a contrastive study in Cooperative Principles. Politeness Principles and Speech.Acts. And it also dcseribes the differences of social values in Human Nature. the Concept of Time. Activity. and Function of Language. What's more, psychological sources such as stereotyping. anxiety. memory failure and ethnocentrism also result in sociopragmatie failures. Since most English teachers in China are non-native speakers. the appropriateness and correctness of their English is not very desirable. Thus. material and teaching-induced sources are also one of sources of sociopragmatic failures.In the light of the sources of pragmatic failures, this thesis provides some concrete proposals for pragmatic competence cultivation, aiming at providing some references for English teachers and giving some theoretical support for shift from grammar-centered traditional teaching to culture-centered communicative teaching.