An Adaptation Approach To Pragmatic Failure And Its Implications For Improving Adaptation Competence

Pragmatic failure is a common phenomenon in daily communication. The British linguist Jenny Thomas was the first person who began to study this problem systematically. In the article Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure published in 1983, she proposes that"pragmatic failure has occurred on any occasion on which H perceives the force of S's utterance as other than S intended s/he should perceive it"1 (Thomas, 2003: 683) and she divides pragmatic failure into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. After that, many scholars home and abroad have joined in the study of this issue. In China, He Ziran & Yan Zhuang (1990) first analyse the cross-cultural pragmatic difference in both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects. Their study has aroused many Chinese scholars'attention and interest. Then Qian Guanlian proposes his understanding of pragmatic failure and distinguishes pragmatic failure into intralingual pragmatic failure and interlingual pragmatic failure (Zhang Guo, 2004: 60). And Chen Zhian et al. (2005) tentatively add a third category labeled as pragmabehavioral failure based on the classification of Thomas.With the efforts of these linguists, the study of pragmatic failure has developed rapidly. These researchers have studied pragmatic failure in terms of cultural differences, second language acquisition, language teaching, cognition and adaptation respectively. The previous studies of pragmatic failure have made great achievements in their own fields. However, most of the past researches just study pragmatic failure based on their different research objectives and methodologies. Few of them have made a relatively comprehensive analysis of pragmatic failure.This thesis studies pragmatic failure from the perspective of adaptation and provides some implications for improving adaptation competence, which targets at a full-scale investigation of pragmatic failure. Generally, this thesis intends to apply Verschueren's Adaptation Theory to the analysis of pragmatic failure and discuss the ways to avoid pragmatic failure. Based on the Adaptation Theory, this thesis aims to illustrate: the main cause of pragmatic failure is that in the course of communication either the speaker or the hearer fails to adapt language or behavior to the communicative context, i.e. the language users, the mental world, the social world and the physical world. And through improving adaptation competence, which is proposed by the author, people can avoid pragmatic failure and achieve their communicative goals successfully. In particular, this thesis attempts to make a detailed analysis of pragmatic failure from the adaptation perspective and discuss its implications for improving adaptation competence based on the following steps.First of all, this study anlyses pragmatic failure with the Adaptation Theory. With a lot of examples in daily communication, this thesis gives a relatively comprehensive explanation of the main cause of pragmatic failure in the dynamic process of communication and the communicative context.Then, this thesis uses a whole chapter served as a comprehensive case study to further demonstrate the point proposed previously. The material illustrated in the analysis is the author's real communication experience with an Australian, which is more authentic and persuasive.At last, based on the above analyses and demonstrations, this thesis provides the ways to avoid pragmatic failure. It tentatively proposes a new concept"adaptation competence"and gives its definition according to the author's understanding. This study tries to discuss some approaches to improving adaptation competence and proposes that through raising adaptation awareness, cultural awareness and pragmatic awareness, adaptation competence can be improved. Moreover, this thesis discusses some techniques that can be adopted to raise the awareness of adaptation, culture and pragmatics in the classroom, which may provide some implications for language teaching.The present study of pragmatic failure from the perspective of adaptation may help to enrich the researches on pragmatic failure, and shed light on the causes of it. Moreover, the proposition of the new concept"adaptation competence"and the discussions of the implications for improving adaptation competence may help to arouse people to the importance of this new concept. And the specific techniques for developing adaptation competence in FLT may help to enrich the ways to avoid pragmatic failure.