A Study On Pragmatic Failure From The Perspective Of Cognitive Context

Pragmatic failure arouses unpleasant feelings or even inflammation between participants and brings breakdown to communication. As a result, it severely holds back the communication between people. 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 classifies pragmatic failure into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. During the last 20 years or so, pragmaticians have carried out contrastive research into many different pragmatic failures in a very wide range of languages. However, there are some inadequacies in those researches. This thesis, by analyzing the nature and causes of pragmatic failure from a new perspective---cognitive context, intends to demonstrate the interpretative force of cognitive context on pragmatic failure.Cognitive context, put forward by Sperber & Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, is a concept that is different from the traditional context. It is a new approach to context based on a general view of cognition. It draws central attention to the role of contextual inference and provides the powerful explanation for the nature of context from the dynamic point of view. Cognitive context is regarded as a psychological construct made up of a set of assumptions that have to be established and developed in the course of interaction of communicators. Understanding each utterance needs different contextual factors, so the hearer is supposed to construct new context with the utterance proceeding interpretation. Consequently, cognitive context is described as chosen and dynamic. Cognitive context stresses the functions of psychological activities of human being in the process of communication from the dynamic angle that accords with the nature of communication. Through the exploration of the context theory and the comparison between traditional and cognitive context, the main features of cognitive context can be concluded as follows:1) Cognitive context is a psychological construct.2) Cognitive context is dynamic rather than static.3) Cognitive context is individual.Cognitive context is selected and constructed in the course of communication rather than given or determined beforehand. The process of communication is the participation of cognitive context. Without cognitive context, the verbal communication cannot be realized. This thesis, under the framework of cognitive context with its features and related theory, will probe into the causes of pragmatic failure from the following aspects: lack of requisite cognitive context for the communication; failure to activate the appropriate cognitive context; failure to construct new cognitive context; failure to select the appropriate cognitive context; mismatch of the cognitive context of the communicators; failure to achieve the contextual effect.With the detailed study of pragmatic failure in human verbal communication from the perspective of cognitive context, this thesis concludes in the end that studying pragmatic failure from the perspective of cognitive context helps reveal the nature and the causes of pragmatic failure and solve the inadequacies made by the former researches, which opens up a new dimension to the study of pragmatic failure. At the same time, it brings us a new perspective to analyze the success and failure in cross-cultural communication.