Pragmatic Failures In English-chinese Cross-cultural Communication

Since the 21 st century, human science and technology has made a great and leap development. Meanwhile, as the increasingly frequent communication between countries on politics, culture, science and technology and trade exchanges, cross-cultural communication attracts more and more attention. It deserves us to notice that errors, contradictions and conflicts are gradually revealed in the process of cross-cultural communication because of the different cultural concepts. Different countries, different nationalities have their own culture. Ways of thinking, the huge barriers of culture and values often cause the communication failure. Therefore, the thesis tries to find the way to solve this problem through the analysis of pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication.As a common phenomenon in cross-cultural communication, pragmatic failure has a long history, it widely exists in communication activities under every language and culture background. We can have a better understanding of different cultures by acquiring the cause and reason of failure in cross-cultural communication. And the word “pragmatic failure” was first put forward by the British scholar Jenny Thomas 1983 in her thesis. From then on, pragmatic failure has attracted much attention of scholars at home and abroad, gradually the Chinese scholars are also passionate about it. Of course, pragmatic failure in the communication often causes the misunderstandings of both the speaker and listener, some failures are less innocuous, but some are devastating, even beyond your imagination. This is also the reason why scholars devoted themselves to this topic, so the study on pragmatic failures in communication can never be paid too much attention to.The article goes on an investigation of pragmatic failures under the background of culture and intercultural communication, through reviewing the domestic and foreign studies of pragmatic failures, we sum up their achievements, also find out the limitations of these studies. Then confirm the learners as the main body of language learning, and analyze the failures from two aspects--- pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure, show the details of these two failures in the cross-cultural communication. Based on it, we creatively put forward the psychological pragmatic failure and kinestic pragmatic failure, and list a lot of examples as the basis.Then the author analyzes the causes of pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication and the key to solve these failures. The author thinks it is really necessary for the language learning and the scholars who are interested in this problem. So far, the study of this subject is not deep enough, and lack a large number of corpus to support the findings. In this article, we use multi-level analysis and exploration to find out the secret of pragmatic failure, so as to make more people know and understand pragmatic failure and provide some beneficial reference to the communicator in the intercultural communication, by using this to enlighten their mind and improve the language ability of communicator.This thesis consists of introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction part mainly introduces writing purpose, significance and research methods.The text can be divided into four chapters, respectively describing the causes of problems, reasons and the strategies to solve the problem.The first chapter introduces the understanding of culture and intercultural communication. Because culture is the common production of a group or community, not owned by certain person; it is national and regional; it includes language and regards language as an important carrier; it is the medium of language and world. And cross-cultural communication is a language activity, also a kind of cultural activity, culture affects the whole process of cross-cultural communication activity. Thus based on it, we propose the definition of communicative competence and intercultural competence under the background of culture and pave the way for the next chapter.The second chapter mainly discusses the performances of pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication, first the author introduces some speech act theories related to communication as a basis for the further study, puts forward the definition of pragmatics, then describes the definition and classification of pragmatic failure, and points out the causes of pragmatic failures from the aspects of pragmalinguistics failures and sociopragmatic failures which proposed by Jenny Thomas. On the basis of it, the author gives some other classifications about the failure.The third chapter gives some reasons why pragmatic failure can happen in the cross-cultural communication. It includes many complex factors, not only external, such as the different beliefs and values, ethics, diversification of social relations, cultural context, the different natural environment, etc. Besides these, some internal factors such as, negative transfer of mother tongue, verbal ambiguity, ellipsis may also cause this problem.In the fourth chapter, the author comes up with some strategies which can reduce the pragmatic failure.There are a lot of reasons which can cause pragmatic failure in daily life, and in order to avoid it, the development of language competence becomes so important. It requires us to open our mind to understand the meaning of discourse and possess the relevant cultural background knowledge. At the same time, we also need to master the unique part of each language system as much as possible. Hope this article may bring some inspiration to the readers.