Pragmatic Failure In Intercultural Communication

Culture plays a very important role in communication. It can help determine and guide communicative behavior. However, in intercultural situations, misunderstandings and miscommunications happen frequently because the behavior of participants is reflecting more divergent underlying communicative and socio-cultural norms. In other words, cultural differences often lead to pragmatic failures.As the most important dimension of cultural difference across the diverse cultures of the world is the relative emphasis on individualism and collectivism, this thesis analyzes the different manifestations of pragmatic failure in these two cultures from the perspective of Sociopragmatic Interactional Principles (SIPs). It is not hard to find out that collectivistic culture attaches more importance to SIPs; or, collectivistic culture has a wider range of SIPs than individualistic culture. To achieve the goal of being a competent intercultural communicator, the awareness of cultural differences is necessary to both language teachers and learners, especially those between collectivistic culture and individualistic culture. As the theory of SIPs is still new and needs to be implemented, there is still a long way to go.