On The Communication Failure

Language is the most important tool for human communication, the essential feature that differentiates human beings from animals and the symbol of human civilization. As an important communication tool for human beings, language has such two characters: the regularity and stability in the form and changeability in the meaning. Speech communication is a dynamic process of information controlling system. The following four factors must be contained in speech communication: communicators, the communicative motivation, communicative language and communicative context, in which the speaker and hearer, as communicators, compose a system of information processing. In successful speech communication, the speaker's communicative intention can arouse the equivalent response of the hearer. However, it is not necessarily the case in actual communication. The speaker's intention is often misunderstood by the hearer, that is, there comes the communication gap between the speaker and hearer, which is what we usually call speech communication failure. The concept of speech communication failure can be interpreted as follows: the communicative partner cannot understand the complete sentence or part of it; namely, the speaker's intention cannot be realized at all or completely. In actual communication, communication failure is inevitable. A famous Russian linguist namedА.М.Пешковскийhas ever said,"What one can understand completely is only what he says by himself."Communication failure can occur either among strangers, or between familiar communicators; even it may sometimes happen among those with very close relationship. Therefore, in order to realize the expected effect of Russian speech act in utterances and achieve the communicative purpose, it is far from enough only to master the intradisciplines of languages, but to learn about the pragmatic disciplines and conversation regularities. In view of the great significance of discussing speech communication failure, the paper makes a detailed illustration on the communication failure in Russian language.The paper includes five parts.Part One puts forward the concept of speech communication failure and the theoretical basis of the research, and explains the relationship between speech communication failure and pragmatic failure.Part Two illustrates the factors that lead to speech communication failure. The paper holds that the factors are mainly include the following four aspects: non-linguistic factors, linguistic factors, pragmatic factors and cultural factors.Part Three mainly talks about the phenomena of speech communication failure caused by...