Cognitive Approach To Pragmatic Failures In Politeness

Pragmatic failures of politeness in inter-cultural communication have been very common phenomena and to a large extent are influencing smoothness and effectiveness of communication seriously, which are the focus of this paper. Confined in intercultural communication between Chinese and English native speakers, few former studies are concentrated on the pragmatic failures of politeness, nor analyze the causes from a cognitive perspective. So different from the former studies of pragmatic failures and politeness and traditional analysis on causes, this paper describes pragmatic failures in some categories of polite speech acts and gives a new approach to analyze the causes that lead to such failures.In terms of daily speech acts, such as addressing, greetings, compliment, farewell, refusal, apology, request and so on, pragmatic failures in practice are illustrated and simply discussed. In this paper, the main causes are classified into three categories, which are politeness transfer, different culture-based cognitive environment, and improper choice of context. By means of cognitive views and thoeries of prototype and relevance, and combination of the two cognitive, theories the three causes are probed deeply in details. The prototypical politeness of individuals in intercultural communication will be transferred into the communication consciously or unconsciously. The formation of cognitive environment is based on the native culture and the most relevant culture factors are always playing as reference points and prototype to influence the communication. The relevant context with optimal relevance will come up first in one's culture and plays to proceed the communication. Such different prototypical understanding of context in different cultures and languages inevitably result in communcative failures.To summerize, from a new perspective, this paper explores politeness failures in intercultural communication, presents the discussion of causes in the light of cognitive view and provides a reference for English learnng and teaching, as well as intercultural communication.