A Study Of Pragmatic Failure In Cross-Cultural Communicaton From The Schematic Perspective

With the constant and rapid development of economic globalization,the international communications occur more frequently than ever before.Even though the communicators are linguistically competent and able to speak English fluently,they still cannot communicate with the native speakers appropriately and even have been confronted with the breakdown during the cross-cultural communication.Under the serious and deep influence of their native cultural backgrounds and social norms,people communicate with others from different cultural backgrounds unconsciously concerning their own beliefs,thinking patterns,communicative modes and linguistic knowledge,which brings about the pragmatic failures.Pragmatic failure,first proposed by British linguist Thomas in her paper“Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure”,refers to “the inability to understand what is meant by what is said”(Thomas,1983:91).Furthermore,Pragmatic failure is classified into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure.As pragmatic failure frequently occurs in cross-cultural communication,the scholars abroad and at home have started to do many researches on the definitions of pragmatic failure and have spared no efforts to probe into the causes of the pragmatic failure from different theoretical perspectives.However,most of the researches analyze the causes of pragmatic failure from the perspectives of culture transfer,speech act,semantics,teaching methods etc,but the perspective of the communicators' psychological factors is not taken into account.Moreover,the researches on causes of pragmatic failure are mainly from the point of view of the speakers,hearers usually being neglected.Besides,the researches have attached inadequate importance on the pragmatic failure occurring at the intonation and discourse level.In the light of deficiency,the thesis attempts to investigate the causes of pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication from cognitive perspective—schema theory.As one of the most important conceptual frameworks,schema theory plays a crucial role in understanding text and utterance.Schema theory is fundamentally a theory of how knowledge is mentally represented in human being's long-term memory.And the knowledge is stored in mind in the form of schema,which can provide a framework to understand,explain,organize and assimilate the information during the utterance.On the process of interpreting utterance,schema makes function on theselection,prediction and enrichment of the incoming information.Through the analysis of the collected cases from angle of the schema function,the thesis finds that the occurrence of pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication is not caused by the communicators' linguistic inability or deficiency,but is caused by the communicators' inappropriate selection,false prediction and unsuccessful enrichment of schema in communication,which are due to the different cultural backgrounds and individual experiences.Furthermore,based on schematic analysis of pragmatic failure,the thesis proposes certain measures for the foreign language teachers and learners to avoid the occurrence of pragmatic failure and some potential ways to develop the communicators' pragmatic competence.Foreign language teachers should put emphasis on the authenticity of the materials,the importance of contextual situation and the comparison of different cultural backgrounds.Foreign language learners should keep a creative attitude toward the learning method and pragmatic failure as well as keep updating the scope of knowledge.