Pragmatic Failure: An Adaptation-based Approach

Pragmatic failure is a hot issue in both pragmatics and cross-culturalstudy. The term pragmatic failure was first proposed by Jenny Thomas to referto the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. Pragmatic failuremay lead to misunderstandings or communication breakdown, thus it isworthwhile to study pragmatic failure.So far, many scholars, both in China and abroad, have conducted studiesand researches in this field. Their findings have laid foundation for furtherresearches. In spite of the achievements, there are still several disadvantages intheir studies. For example, most of their researches are confined to the study ofcross-cultural pragmatic failure, neglecting the study of intra-culturalpragmatic failure;most researches are conducted from the perspective of thespeaker, without taking the hearer into consideration.In this thesis, by making use of the notion of communicative context inVerschueren's Adaptation Theory, the author investigates the causes ofpragmatic failure from a new perspective. When people make a linguisticchoice, they have to take all the four ingredients of communicative contextinto account, otherwise pragmatic failure may arise.After analyzing the causes of pragmatic failure, some measures areproposed to help reduce pragmatic failure in communication.