A Cognitive Study Of Pragmatic Failure

The fact that pragmatic failure is always seriously preventing people from communicating successfully with each other urges people to analyze it and put forward some suggestions to avoid it. The study of pragmatic failure begins with Jenny Thomas. She first proposes the notion of pragmatic failure in her Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure in 1983.She classified pragmatic failure into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. From that time on, many scholars at home and abroad have begun to contribute a great deal of efforts to the definition, the classification and the cause of pragmatic failure from different perspectives and have achieved much progress. However, in spite of the achievements made by present studies, there are still some defects in those researches.Therefore, the author attempts to probe into the cognitive sources of pragmatic failure in communication, drawing heavily on Relevance Theory by Sperber & Wilson (1995). In the study, it is held that both the speaker and the addressee are responsible for the emergence of pragmatic failure. If the speaker fails to make an appropriate presupposition about the hearer?s contextual assumptions and cognitive abilities,or even overlooks the hearer?s context, the utterances he produces will not be ostensive and relevant enough for the addressee?s inferential interpretation. Pragmatic failure will arise. On the other hand, the hearer?s selection of contextual assumption also may lead to pragmatic failure.The thesis consists of six parts. Part 1 is introduction. Part 2 provides an overview of pragmatic failure and the previous achievements of the scholars. In addition, the author points out some defects in those researches. Part 3 provides a theoretical foundation for the study---Relevance Theory. In part 4, the author analyzes pragmatic failure from the cognitive perspective. In part 5, the author provides some tentative suggestions for foreign language teaching. Part 6 concludes the whole paper and points out the limitation of the study and suggestions for the future research.The discussion on the cognitive sources of pragmatic failure will deepen our understanding not only of the phenomenon of pragmatic failure, but also of the academic value of Relevance Theory. In addition, it also has practical significance, that is, it puts forward some suggestions not only for communicators to avoid pragmatic failure in communication but also for foreign language teaching.