A Study Of Pragmatic Failure Under Adaptation-relevance Model In TV Entertainment Program: If You Are The One

The cause of pragmatic failure is the incapacity of the utterance of the hearer(Thomas,1983:91). Qian Guanlian divides pragmatic failure into interlingualpragmatic failure and intrallingual pragmatic failure. Qian Guanlian(1997:223) pointsout that Pragmatic failure is committed when the speaker uses grammatically correctsentences, but unconsciously violates the interpersonal relationship rules, socialconventions or takes little notice of the time, space and addressee. This phenomenonespecially in highly interactive TV entertainment programs should be noticed inharmonious stage communication. Most of the researchers think that pragmatic failureis mainly from the perspective of cross-culture; Cultural differences are the mostprominent cause. Culture is not the only cause of pragmatic failure. It is inductive todo intralingual pragmatic failure research by putting it in a specific field. There is aneed to give a systematic study on intralingual pragmatic failure in TV entertainmentprograms. The conversation in the TV entertainment program is a splendid place totest the validity of linguistic theories about pragmatic failure. This paper finds thatboth the speaker and the hearer should take the responsibility of the result ofcommunication. Few researches have been done from the perspective ofadaptation-relevance theory. This paper is researched from both the speaker and thehearer’s perspective under the adaptation-relevance model.Take if you are the one for example, this paper attempts to probe into thecontextual causes of pragmatic failure by adapting the adaptation-relevance model. Itis found that pragmatic failure is caused by the factors of linguistic context. Thereason of its occurrence is that the speaker fails to estimate the cognitive ability of thehearer, or the different ways of expression between the speaker and the hearer, or theutterance of speaker causes confusion on hearer’s formation of contextual assumption.Therefore, in the hearer’s process of adaptation-relevance, he or she has to use his orher own information to extent, adjust, or adapt his or her contextual assumption to adapt to the speaker’s utterance. If the information the hearer chosen to form his or hercontextual assumption is not concord to that of the speaker, pragmatic failure occurs.In the situational context, because of the hearer failure to adapt to the contextualassumption of the speaker, or failure to obtain the real intention of the speaker, thenpragmatic failure occurs. In the perspective of the background context, as thedifference of the personal knowledge, experience, social status, psychology results inpragmatic failure.This paper attempts to probe into the causes of pragmatic failure by adapting theadaptation-relevance model. After the specific cases analysis from If you are the one.It also carries out several strategies to solve the problem of pragmatic failureaccording to the causes of pragmatic failure, and tries to explain the occurrence ofpragmatic failure by the generative process. It attempts not only to deepen theunderstanding of contextual causes of pragmatic failure but also broaden the researchscope of pragmatic failure by the analysis of pragmatic failure in the entertainmentprogram under the model.