A Study Of Pragmatic Failures In Intercultural Communication

The rapid development of economy and technology has brought us into an age ofglobalization in which we are increasingly in contact with people from other cultures.There is a great potential for communicators to suffer communication breakdowns inintercultural context because of the cultural differences. In intercultural communication,communicators, being deeply influenced by their native cultures, are inclined tonegatively transfer their native cultural conventions and linguistic knowledge intocommunication, thus committing pragmatic failures----failing to understandcounterparts'intentions and transmit their actual ideas. Through an analysis of thepragmatic failures, the author aims to find a way of tackling the problems inintercultural communication. This paper begins with defining the terms like culture, communication,intercultural communication, and describing the components and characteristics of them.According to some sociologists and anthropologists, culture is communication. Inintercultural communication, cultural interference is inevitable as long as there existcultural differences, which should be paid attention to not only verbal communicationprocess but also non-verbal communication process. Pragmatics directs attention to the relation between signs or linguistic expressionsand their users, and also plays an important role in intercultural communication. Fromthe viewpoint of intercultural encounters, what is particularly relevant tomiscommunication is the link pragmatics makes between the ways that communicativebehavior is performed and the ongoing understandings of the behavior by the people ininteraction. So in this thesis, some influential theories of pragmatics are introduced atsome length to make sense of communication and communicationbreakdowns There are two types of pragmatic failures: pragmalinguistic failure andsociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure concerns with the language-specificusage or highly conventionalized usage. And it can be thought of as the inappropriatetransfer of speech act strategies from source language to target language.Sociopragmatic failure is far more delicate a matter, since it involves the speakers'system of beliefs, desires, intentions as much as their knowledge of language, and it canbe regarded as the result of cross-culturally different assessments of social parametershaving negatively affected our linguistic choices. The author regards that the most directcauses for these two pragmatic failures are negative transfers,which include negativetransfers in tiers of linguistic knowledge and cultural convention. And from theperspective of negative transfer and with the incorporation of comparison betweenChinese and English culture, much emphasis has been laid on the analyses of these twokinds of pragmatic failures so as to help communicators or English learners understandthe problem. Finally, the author offers some strategies such as cultivating cultural awareness,avoiding stereotype etc. to help communicators tackle or lessen pragmatic failures inintercultural communications. In this thesis, the author makes an analysis of pragmatic failures from theincorporation of cultural-anthropological perspectives and sociolinguistic pragmaticperspectives, which is a new angle of studying pragmatic failures in interculturalcommunication,though there is much to be desired.