A Study On College Students' Intercultural Pragmatic Failures Of Nonverbal Communication

iThe linguists divided pragmatic failures into three sub-categories: pragmalinguistic failures,sociopragmaticfailures and nonverbal pragmatic failures.However,previous studies attached too much importance to the former two categories,and nonverbal pragmatic failures are neglected for its abstractness.Meanwhile,Relevance-Adaptation Theory was always employed to research the former two categories,but in recent years there are a lot of scholars proposed that the study of nonverbal behaviors should be also contained in Relevance-Adaptation Theory,however,the researches were not so fruitful.The difference between the present study and the previous studies is that this thesis analyzes which aspects of Relevance-Adaptation Theory are violated in intercultural nonverbal communication pragmatic failures,and how to avoid the intercultural nonverbal communication pragmatic failures under the guidance of Relevance-Adaptation Theory.There are many cases of intercultural nonverbal pragmatic failures collected in real contexts by observation and interview,according to Bi(1991)and Rogers & Steinfatt's(1999)categories,the nonverbal signs were divided into four aspects,including kinesies,paralanguage,chrominecs and proximics.In kinesies,facial expression and eye contact and gaze are studied;in paralanguage,silence and turn-taking are analyzed;in chrominecs,monochronic and polychronic are researched;in proximics,proximity,territoriality are discussed.All the cases are centered on the college students in intercultural communicative contexts,and analyzed by contrast and qualitative methods under the guidance of Relevance-Adaptation Theory.Through the analysis the author found that the college students violated Relevance-Adaptation Theory in mental world,social world and physical world.Vershueren pointed out that in people's mental world,personality,emotions,beliefs,desires or wishes and motivations or intentions are working corporately,all these elements are combined together and play a significant part in interaction.In social world,factors like attitude,properties of social settings or institutions,culture,social class,ethnicity and race,nationality,linguistic group,religion,norms in specific context,age,level of education,profession,kinship,gender,sexual preference,and so on,should be taken into account in the process of choice-making in Relevance and Adaptation.And temporal deixis and spatial deixis are the most noticeable factors in anchoring choice-making into a physical world.Based on the case analysis,there are also some feasible proposals for college students to avoid the nonverbal pragmatic failures from the perspective of Relevance-Adaptation Theory.First,improving the relevance ability by enlarging knowledge rang,to be specific,rising cultural awareness and developing cultural empathy.Second,improving the adaptation ability by cultivating adaptative concept,which can be obtained by enhancingpragmatic competence and improving cultural tolerance.