A Relevance-theoretic Account Of Pragmatic Failure

As the cultural presuppositions can be major stumbling blocks on the road to understanding, during the last 20 years or so, pragmaticians have carried out contrastive research into many different pragmatic features in a very wide range of languages. However, the previous study is mainly revolved around Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Theories of Politeness and Brown and Levinson's 'Face' model. This thesis, by analysis of the nature and reason for cross-cultural pragmatic failure with the new cognitive scientific theory-Relevance Theory, intends not only to provide scientific basis for the research with the aim of contributing to communicative language teaching, but also to demonstrate the interpretative force of Relevance Theory on cross-cultural pragmatic failure.Relevance, as we know, does not address everything related to verbal communication, nor do the authors claim that it does. Why RT can be relied upon for a study of cross-cultural pragmatic failure is one of emphases of my thesis. According to the definition of pragmatics given in Relevance: "Pragmatics is the study of the general cognitive principles and abilities involved in utterance interpretation, and of their cognitive effects" (Sperber and Wilson, 1987:5). The definition indicates that the success or failure of communication depends on the interpretation of the intended lines. Wilson (1994: 35) also mentioned in his Relevance and Understanding: "Relevance Theory is intended to match human performance in comprehension". Thus, it can be inferred RT can be relied on to give reasonable account for both failure and success on communication. I hold the interpretative force of RT in accounting for cross-cultural pragmatic failure consists in two aspects: Relevance is a matter of degree; Relevance is a rule of universality. First, what makes the communicator's utterances relevant or less relevant or irrelevant is in terms of the interpretive process available to the hearer in thatcontext. Every utterance comes with a guarantee of its own particular relevance. As the relevance of what is said to a hearer from a distant culture usually costs more effort than it would do to one from the same language community; this makes the principle of relevance even more important in measuring the degree of success or failure in cross-cultural communication. Second, RT hasn't abandoned the traditional 'Code-Model' encoding-decoding process. Instead, it is believed to be the basis of inferential communication. Meanwhile, Sperber and Wilson give further corrections and supplements to the Grice's inferential model and point out communication is the ostensive-inferential process. Utterance interpretation is a kind of cognitive activity. To realize mutual manifestness and ensure the success on communication, you just need to get the relevance between utterances. Compared with Grice's Cooperative Principle, the rule of universality makes RT more intuitive and natural on explanation to cross-cultural communication.A new elaboration to the nature and reason for pragmatic failure on the basis of RT is the second focus of my thesis. According to Wolfson, pragmatic transfer is the nature of pragmatic failure, for she believes "The use of rules of speaking from one's own native speech community when interacting with members of the host community or simply when speaking or writing in a second language is known as pragmatic transfer"(Wolfson 1989:141), which has caused pragmatic failure. But this explanation seems not enough. According to the Principle of Economy, the goal of communication is not merely to convey communication, but to convey it economically. Moreover, the communicator hopes to get optimally relevant with the tendency to minimize the expenditure of processing effort. So this relevance, as a matter of degree in terms of contextual effects and processing efforts in utterance interpretation, is the driving force behind pragmatic failure. Resort to cognitive principles and to the Principle of Relevance, the direct factors which result in miscommunicati...