An Analysis Of English Tour Guides' Pragmatic Failures In Cross-Cultural Communication

Nowadays, more and more people live, work and study among different groups of people and people of different cultural backgrounds communicate much more with each other than any time before, thus making intercultural contact occur. International tourism provides a very good illustration of this trend. As the soul of tourism, English-speaking tour guides play an important role in international tourism. However, some tour guides do not understand or are not aware of different tourists' ways of thinking, rules of speaking, social values, and cultural backgrounds; therefore, different types of pragmatic failure occur. Accordingly, miscommunication or cross- cultural communication breakdown would result. Some cross-cultural pragmatic failures have caused a great economic loss. So the research of pragmatic failure in intercultural communication has become a problem of important theoretic meaning and realistic value in the contemporary linguistic study. For reasons mentioned above, the present thesis has made an attempt exploration on the concerned questions of pragmatic failures made by English-speaking tour guides in intercultural communication in order to provide some suggestions effective intercultural communication.Based on the cross-cultural pragmatic failure theory developed by Jenny Thomas (1983), the thesis addresses 4 issues, namely, 1, Effective intercultural communication; 2, forms of pragmatic failure made by English-speaking tour guides in cross-cultural communication; 3, the causes of English-speaking tour guides' cross-cultural pragmatic failures; 4, suggested strategies of removing pragmatic failure in intercultural communication. In intercultural communication, two different cultural contexts are involved. When encoding and decoding are conducted according to their own linguistic and cultural patterns, pragmatic failures can happen repeatedly. Pragmatic failures can be categorized into two sorts: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure is the failure in the language itself and it mainly occurs in phonetics, word and grammar. Sociopragmatic failure is the failure in the cultural context and it occurs in the choice of linguistic forms. The reasons that cause the pragmatic failure in intercultural communication are various, not only in the language, but also in the culture. Basic measures of resolving pragmatic failure in intercultural communication lie in how to improve tour guides intercultural competence. Thomas (1983) suggests linguistic competence is composed of two types of competence: "grammatical competence" and "pragmatic competence". Pragmatic competence or communicative competence is what some English speaking tour guides often lack. Pragmatic competence is composed of two parts: Illocutionary competence and sociolinguistic competence. In intercultural communication, when both linguistic competence and social cultural competence are achieved, communication failures can be prevented.The thesis falls into six parts.Chapter one is a brief introduction of the thesis.Chapter two sees the literature review, in which the basic notions about cross- cultural pragmatic failure and pragmatic competence are offered. It also explains two categories of pragmatic failures and the speech act theory. The previous cross-cultural studies are also introduced.Chapter three discusses the relationship among culture, cross-cultural communication and tourism.Chapter four exemplifies two typical cases that lead to the occurrence of cross- cultural pragmatic failures in tourism and illustrates the reasons that cause the pragmatic failures through the analysis of the difference of value system and language rules between people from different cultures.Chapter five focuses on some suggested approaches and the limitations of the present thesis. Some recommendations for further research within the similar fields are also presented in this part.Chapter six serves as a conclusion.The significance of this thesis consists in its application of linguistic theory to the practice of English Language use. The author analyzes pragmatic failures made by tour guides from cross-cultural communication perspective. Therefore, the innovation in fostering tour guides' pragmatic competence can be promoted.