An Analysis Of Chinese English Learners’ Pragmatic Failure From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

The rapid expansion of worldwide transportation and communication networks makes the world as the global village. This trend makes people from different cultures intertwine so closely that communicating effectively with people from the others’ cultures takes on the extremely urgency. Intercultural communication, as a significant activity, becomes more and more popular. However, the misunderstanding or communication failure may even become the rules rather than the exception in the intercultural communication, due to natural barriers of language and cultural difference. This kind of phenomenon is called pragmatic failure.Pragmatic failure usually exists in various forms of communication and communicative activities in different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. British scholar Jenny Thomas is the first person to introduce the concept of pragmatic failure in 1983, which is agreed and accepted by the academic community. Pragmatic failure, according to Thomas, refers to the mistakes in which people failed to get perfect communication effects. Since then, with the development of intercultural communication, more and more linguists and scholars at home and abroad put the pragmatic failure as the heart topic and do some researches about it. They make some contributions to the study of pragmatic failure and have gained much achievement, such as, the shift from Thomas’s two categories of pragmatic failure to three categories of that. That is, pragmalinguistic failure, sociopragmatic failure and pragmabehavior failure.To study nature of pragmatic failure, this thesis attempts to analyze pragmalinguistic failure, sociopragmatic failure and pragmabehavior failure in intercultural communication to by using some pragmatic theories in terms of the linguistic and cultural diversity, which contributes to cultivate the pragmatic competence and avoid pragmatic failure that arises in intercultural communication.The framework of the thesis is made up of three parts:an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. The main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction. Firstly, this part introduces the background and purpose of this thesis. And then it gives a brief of introduction of Thomas’s partition of pragmatic failure and other scholars’ research at home and abroad and related theoretical support. Finally, it introduces the enlightenment significance.The second part is the main body which consists of four chapters.In the first chapter, it mainly introduces intercultural communication and pragmatic failure. As for intercultural communication, this chapter introduces the feature of culture, communication and intercultural communication respectively and their closely relationship. As for pragmatic failure, this chapter discusses the three types of pragmatic failure and related pragmatic principles, which are taken as the theoretical supports.In the second chapter, it analyzes pragmalinguistic failure on three levels:the first one is phonetic level, in which it mainly analyzes pragmatic failure caused by different syllable, pronunciation, stress and intonation; on the lexical level, this chapter mainly analyzes pragmatic failure due to Chinese-English different lexical associative meaning, metaphorical meaning and lexical gap; on the grammatical level, this chapter contrasts Chinese-English different grammatical structure and sentence structure to analyzes pragmatic failure.In the third chapter, it analyzes sociopragmatic failure and pragmabehavior failure on two levels, that is, the verbal level and non-verbal level. On the verbal level, it analyzes some concrete social speech acts in the intercultural communication, such as greetings, compliments, thanking and farewell, from the cultural diversity and difference. On the non-verbal level, it analyzes several nonverbal behaviors, such as, paralanguage, body language and environmental language, which are manifested in different cultures with different social-cultural meaning.In the fourth chapter, it mainly introduces the ways of avoiding pragmatic failure in the intercultural communication that we get from the analysis of pragmatic failure, such as, cultivating cultural sensitivity and enhancing pragmatic competence.The last part is conclusion. This part simply summarizes the basic content and research significance. And finally, I point out the weak points and problems of this thesis which should be paid more attention in the further study.