Cultivating Cross-cultural Communicative Competence Of Chinese Learners Of English: From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Failure Caused By Negative Pragmatic Transfer

The rapid development of economy and technology has brought us into an age of globalization in which we are increasingly in contact with people from other cultures. There is a great potential for communicators to suffer from communication breakdowns in intercultural context because of the cultural differences. In intercultural communication, communicators, being deeply influenced by their native cultures, are inclined to negatively transfer their native cultural conventions and linguistic knowledge into communication, thus committing pragmatic failures—failing to understand counterparts' intentions and transmit their actual ideas. Through an analysis of thepragmatic failures caused by negative pragmatic transfer, the author aims to find a way of tackling the problems in intercultural communication.This paper begins with defining the terms like intercultural communication, negative pragmatic transfer and pragmatic failure and describing the components and characteristics of them. According to some sociologists and anthropologists, culture is communication. In intercultural communication, cultural interference is inevitable as long as there exist cultural differences.There are three types of pragmatic failures: pragmalinguistic failure, sociopragmatic failure and pragmarhetoric failure. Pragmalinguistic failure concerns with the language-specific usage or highly conventionalized usage. And it can be thought of as the inappropriate transfer of speech act strategies from source language to target language. Sociopragmatic failure is a far more delicate matter, since it involves the speakers' system of beliefs, desires, intentions as much as their knowledge of language, and it can be regarded as the result of cross-culturally different assessments of social parameters having negatively affected our linguistic choices. Pragmarhetoric failure is a kind of failure which occurs when learners rely on their native pragmatic knowledge in realizing desired pragmatic effects in the way or linguistic means used whencomprehending and producing a speech act in target language. The author regards that the most direct causes for these three pragmatic failures are negative pragmatic transfers, which include negative transfers in tiers of linguistic knowledge, cultural convention and thought pattern. And from the perspective of negative pragmatic transfer and with the incorporation of comparison between Chinese and English culture, much emphasis has been laid on the analyses of these three kinds of pragmatic failures so as to help communicators or English learners understand the problem.Finally, the author offers some strategies such as cultivating cultural awareness, avoiding stereotype etc. to help communicators tackle or lessen pragmatic failures in intercultural communications.In this thesis, the author makes an analysis of pragmatic failures from the incorporation of cultural-anthropological perspectives and sociolinguistic pragmatic perspectives;analyses the reasons for their happening and makes a comparatively detailed figure to illustrate them however, there is much to be desired.