A Study Of Pragmatic Failure In The Use Of English By College Students From The Perspective Of Cultural Transfer

Pragmatic failure was first proposed by Thomas, which mainly refers to “theinability to understand ‘what is meant by what is said’”(Thomas,1983). It has beenstudying by linguists in intercultural communication for thirty years, and often occursin the communicative activities, in which intercultural communication takes place indifferent cultural backgrounds. Pragmatic failure only has the history of thirty years,since it was first proposed by Jenny Thomas in1982as a kind of phenomenon whichexists in language. Scholars at home and abroad began to attach more importance tothe study of pragmatic failure from then on. Particularly, Chinese linguists are keen onstudying the phenomenon of pragmatic failure in intercultural communication.Actually, cultural transfer is one of the most important reasons for pragmaticfailure in intercultural communication. Cultural transfer often happens when peoplefrom different culture apply their cultural systems and values to direct their behaviorsin the process of intercultural communication, and often use the similar culturalcriterion or values to judge the behaviors of others whose cultural backgrounds arequite different. Culture factors involve in every aspect of peoples’ daily lives, such aslanguage forms, thinking patterns, value systems, religious beliefs, which all differfrom culture to culture.People are more likely to use their native cultural norms to judge others’behaviors unconsciously when communicating with people who come from differentcultures. The reason is that their native culture has been rooted in their mind deeply.Pragmatic failure could happen easily under these situations. As we have mentioned above, cultural transfer is one of the biggest reasons to cause pragmatic failure amongall factors. Therefore, in this thesis, the author elaborates the concept of culturaltransfer, in which two manifestations are presented: one is positive cultural transfer,and the other is negative cultural transfer. Furthermore, negative cultural transferincludes two aspects, which are surface-structure transfer and deep-structure transferrespectively. The former is concerned with material layer of culture, which is easy tofind and can be avoided by learning. The latter one, however, is concerned withpsychological layer of culture value, which is difficult to discover in interculturalcommunication, and usually causes serious communicative obstacles.Communication is the basic skill for Chinese learners of English. Therefore, thisthesis first introduces the importance of intercultural communication and theoreticalframeworks of the whole thesis, in which theories of pragmatic competence,pragmatic failure and speech act theory will be focused. Based on the collected data,the author analyzes the main reasons of cultural transfer and pragmatic failures. In thispart, the research will make a deep investigation about the pragmatic failurescommitted by English learners and try to explore students’ pragmatic failure based onthe theory of cultural transfer, discussing the reasons and how to avoid the appearanceof pragmatic failure. At the end of this thesis, some suggestions for both foreignlanguage teachers and learners of how to avoid pragmatic failure are presented by theauthor in order to help learners of English express more appropriate Englishutterances in intercultural communication.