Pragmatic Failures In Intercultural Communication

With the rapid development of globalization and frequent contacts among different countries, intercultural communication is getting more and more important and becomes one of the most prominent and significant activities in the 21st century. However, people from different countries may have different beliefs, values, attitudes and world views. They may use their own cultural values, beliefs and attitudes to understand the others who have different cultural backgrounds. As a result, pragmatic failures will come into being and bring many obstacles in intercultural communication.Since intercultural communication is an inevitable trend, research on pragmatic failures in intercultural communication has become a new task with theoretical significance and practical value. In view of this, this thesis adopts the means of comparative analysis to elaborate the miscommunication phenomena of verbal and nonverbal behaviors and to explore the reasons in various directions and levels.In intercultural communication, due to different cultural values, social norms, thought patterns and communication styles and so on, pragmatic failures can hardly be avoided. It is useful to give oneself more exposure to the target cultural environment and to improve the awareness of cultural differences, which is an effective way of reducing pragmatic failures.Similarly, communicators should also pay more attention to the bad effects of stereotypes and ethnocentrism and apply the techniques such as cultural empathy to eliminate the pragmatic failures as well as to enhance the intercultural communication. This thesis lists, besides daily behaviors, different communication behaviors in the fields of foreign affairs, traveling, and cultural exchange and so forth. With the expansion of data collection, analysis of classic examples and application of pragmatics theory, the purpose of this thesis is to increase the functionality of the research and to provide some useful references for the communicators to accomplish intercultural communication with much convenience and ease.