Analysis Of Pragmatic Failure In Cross-cultural Communication And Implications

Nowadays, the entrance of WTO and globalization of economy have necessitated both cross-cultural and intra-cultural communication, which makes great demands on not only good linguistic competence, but also high pragmatic competence, that is, to use the language in a proper way, and to be able to achieve one's intention successfully.In recent years, researchers have made great efforts to improve foreign language teaching, and it is thought that the pragmatic competence of foreign language learners has been improved a lot. However, pragmatic failure still haunts the language learners and teachers because it is closely concerned with language, culture and communication, which are indispensable in academic and social life.As a tentative research on the nature of pragmatic failure, this paper focuses on the perspective of two-way interaction between the addresser and addressee in cross-cultural communication. Pragmatic failure is a subject widely studied in the field of linguistics, cognition and sociology nowadays. It was first put forth by Thomas who notes that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown (Thomas, 1983:91). Since then, this subject has raised many scholars' attention because it is an indispensable issue in language teaching and cross-cultural communication.Various studies on this issue have been conducted. The early study of pragmatic failure is from the angle of cross-cultural communication, which takes it as a result of culture difference such as different cultural values, thought patterns and social norms. Other scholars study the pragmatic failure in terms of second language acquisition, foreign language teaching, and cognition and propose different countermeasures. And competence such as communicative competence and pragmatic competence have been proposed to deal this problem.This thesis attempts to analyze the nature of pragmatic failure under the framework of Speech Act Theory and the model of verbal communication, noting that the realization of illocutionary force by the main parts of the cross-cultural communication through every level of encoding and decoding can reduce the pragmatic failure. The maximal realization of illocutionary force is the main purpose of communication, which needs the two-way cognitive interaction between addresser and addressee. Then the last part proposes some implications to be taken so as to reduce or avoid the occurrence of pragmatic failure.