A Cultural-Cognitive Research On Politeness Pragmatic Failures

Cross-cultural pragmatic failure has been a hot topic in pragmatics and cross-cultural communication in recent years. In 1983, English linguist Jenny Thomas proposed the notion of pragmatic failure in her Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure and classified it into pragmalinguistic failure and socio-pragmatic failure. From then on, many scholars at home and abroad have made their contributions to the definition of pragmatic failure and have analyzed causes of pragmatic failures from perspectives of cross-cultural communication, negative pragmatic transfer, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching.Politeness is a very important part of culture. Polite expressions play the role of lubricant in daily communication. But because there exist differences of cultural pragmatic value and different pragmatic habits and characteristics, people from different cultural backgrounds have different ways of comprehending and applying politeness, so they misuse polite expressions when communicating with polite languages. As a result, cross-cultural politeness pragmatic failures are committed.Having briefly reviewed relevant references of pragmatic failure at home and abroad, politeness pragmatic failure is proposed and analyzed cultural-cognitively from the perspectives of speech acts (addressing, greeting, compliment, request, apology etc.) and of the discourse based on cognitive context, cognitive expectation and ICMs. Through this kind of study, causes of politeness pragmatic failures are exposed: people's different cognitive expectations, which originate from people's discrepant cognitive context and cognitive models, and these three interdependent theories offer a unified theoretical framework for studying politeness pragmatic failures; the problem of the former studies which only stress the speaker is overcome; meanwhile intralingua politeness pragmatic failures and inter-lingua politeness pragmatic failures are well explained. Finally, shortcomings of this dissertation are pointed out and some further studies in this field are proposed.