Studies On Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

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 and they may use their own cultural values, beliefs and attitudes to understand others from different cultural backgrounds. As a result, pragmatic failures may occur frequently and bring many obstacles in intercultural communication. Since intercultural communication is an inevitable trend, research on pragmatic failure in intercultural communication has become a new task of theoretical significance and practical value. This thesis attempts to analyze the causes of pragmatic failure, and then proposes some measures to reduce or avoid the occurrence of pragmatic failure. A questionnaire was carried out between two groups: sophomores and freshmen in one university, to show as an example on Chinese learners'pragmatic competence. The data collected in this research show that the pragmatic competence of Chinese learners is far from satisfactory and their pragmatic competence doesn't improve with the increase in their linguistic competence. Then a detailed analysis is represented about the caused pragmatic failures in the view of the perspective of adaptation theory from three aspects, cultural context, communicative context and linguistic context, where it is easy for Chinese learners of English to suffer intercultural pragmatic failure. Finally, a conclusion is generated that pragmatic failures occur when language users unconsciously fail to make adaptation to cultural, communicative and linguistic contexts of the target language. Thus, the adaptation approach is an effective way to avoid pragmatic failures in communication and various measures are given to help learners to reduce or/and avoid pragmatic failure. Meanwhile, the thesis points out the deficiency of the research on application of the linguistic adaptation theory in foreign language teaching and proposes several suggestions for the future study.