entrylevelPragmatic Failures in Intercultural Communication

2021年1月21日发(作者：拆除英语)
Pragmatic Failures in Intercultural Communication
Pragmatic Failures in Intercultural
Communication
Abstract: With the globalization of economy and the rapid
development of high technology, international communication has become a
significant concern in the world nowadays. However, there is a great
potential for communicators to suffer communication breakdowns in
intercultural context because of the cultural differences. pragmatic
failures are arisen therefrom. The thesis aiming at expounding pragmatic
failures in international communication, explains the definitions of
intercultural communication and of pragmatic failure, illustrates the
expressing forms of pragmatic failure in the intercultural communication,
analyzes the reasons of pragmatic failure in the intercultural
communication, and deals with precaution strategies of pragmatic failure
in the intercultural communication. All above can help foreign language
learners acquire sound linguistic and communicative competence, and
participate in international communication flexible and properly. Key
words: pragmatic failure; intercultural communication; precaution
strategies
跨文化交际中的语用失误

中文摘要
:
随着经济的高速全球化以及高科技的迅猛发展，跨文化交际已成为

当今世界的一个重要特征。但是文化差异常常会给不同文化背景的人们带来交
际

障碍。语用失误由此而生。本论文将跨文化交际做为研究对象，解释跨文化交
际

以及语用失误的含义，阐述跨文化交际中语用失误的表现，浅析造成语用失误
的
原因，进而提出跨文化交际语用失误的防范对策
,
使学习者的文化从文化知识
层< br>
跨越到文化理解层，从而有效地克服跨文化交际中的语用失误。

关键词< br>:
语用失误
;
语用失误
;
防范对策。

Table of Contents
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………(?)
Introduction………………………………………………………………………..() 1
Brief Review of Relevant Theories……………………………………………...()
1.1Intercultural Communication………………………………………………….()

1.1.1
Culture
and
Communication……………………………………………..()

1.1.2 Definition of Intercultural
Communication………………………………()

1.1.3 Three Elements of Intercultural
Communication………………………...() 1.2
Pragmatic Failure in
Intercultural Communication…………………………...()

1.2.1 Definition of Pragmatic
Failure…………………………………………..()

1.2.2 Classification of Pragmatic
Failure……………………………………….() 2. Expressing Forms of
Intercultural Pragmatic Failure………………………...() 2.
1 Pragma-
linguistic Failure………………………………………………………...() 2.2
Socio-
pragmatic Failure……………………………………………………….()

.3 The relationship between
them………………………………………………..() 2

3. The Causes of Intercultural Pragmatic
Failure………………………………..() 3.1 Different Cultural Valu
es and
Norms………………………………………….()

.1.1 Modesty vs. Self-
denigration……………………………………………...() 3

3.1.2 Privacy vs. Mutual
care…………………………………………………...()

3.1.3 Directness vs.
Indirectness………………………………………………..() 3.2 Inappropriate
Transfer………………………………………………………………...(
) 4.
Precaution Strategies of Intercultural Pragmatic
Failure…………………….() 4.1 Cultivating Our Pragmatic
Competence………………………………………() 4.2 Strengthening Cultural
Awareness………………………………………………..()
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..()
References…………………………………………………………………………..()
中文摘要……………………………………………………………………………()
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………()

Introduction
Nowadays, the development of worldwide transportation and
communication networks, the growth in foreign travel for pleasure, study
and business, the expansion of international trade and the migration of
people seeking work in the multinational companies have naturally led to
a concomitant increase in contacts across national boundaries. The
international and domestic changes in the past few decades have brought
us into direct or indirect contact with people who, because of their
cultural diversity, often behave in ways that we do not understand. It
is no longer difficult to find social and professional situations in
which members of once isolated groups of peoples communicate with
members of other cultural groups. Now these people may live thousands of
miles away or right next door to each other. In other words,
intercultural communication prevails in the so-called global village.
1 Brief Review of Relevant Theories
In this chapter, brief review of Intercultural Communication and
Pragmatic Failure
in Intercultural Communication will be made. This hopefully provides
theoretical background for analyzing the causes of intercultural
pragmatic failure in chapter four nd dealing with precaution strategies
of intercultural pragmatic failure in chapter a
five.
1.1 Intercultural Communication
In this section, such concepts as culture, intercultural
communication and pragmatic failure will be discussed one by one.
1.1.1 Culture and Communication
According to sociolinguists and anthropologists, culture refers to
the total patterns of beliefs, customs, institutions, objects and
techniques that characterize the life of a human community. In
communicative process, culture is a critical factor. But what is culture?
Culture is omnipresent. What people talk about, how they talk about it,
what they see, attend to, or ignore, how they think and what they think
about are influenced by their culture. Culture consists not only of such
material things as cities, schools and organizations, but also of non-
material things such as languages, ideas, family patterns and customs.
Put it simply, culture refers to the entire way of life of a society,
“the ways of a people” (
Klineberg 1935). In order to suit the goal of
this thesis, I
adopt the concept of culture defined by Samovar, Porter and Stefani
in their book Communication between Cultures (2000), that is, “We
define culture as the deposit of
knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings,
hierarchies, religions, notions of time, roles, spatial relations,
concepts of the universe and material objects and possessions acquired
by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and
group stri
ving”(Samovar, Porter & Stefani, 2000:36).

Everyday when people share ideas and emotions with others they are
communicating, regardless of their gender, age, occupation, or even
culture. Despite the differences in culture, they are in fact performing
the same communicative activity. The methods and the results may be
different, but the process is the same. Communication occurs whenever
meaning is attributed to behavior or the residue of behavior-those
things that remain as a record of our actions (Samovar and Porter,
1994:8). It is also the basis of all human contact. But it is not enough,
and this term needs further explanation. It is impossible for people to
share their feelings and experiences by means of direct mind-to-mind
contact. People all isolated from one another by the enclosure of their
skin, so what they know and feel remains insides of them, unless they
communicate. In fact, whenever people interact they must communicate.
Hall once noted, “Culture is communication, and communication is
cultur
e” (Hall, 1977:14). The link between culture and communication is
crucial to the understanding of intercultural communication. Culture and
communication are inseparable. Communicative behavior is largely
dependent on cultures, and culture is the foundation of communication.
Whenever people interact they communicate. To live in societies and to
maintain their cultures they have to communicate. Culture is learned,
acted out, transmitted, and preserved through communication. Culture and
communication act on each other. As the carrier of culture,
communication influences the structure of a culture, and culture is
necessarily manifested in our communication patterns by teaching us how
we should talk and behave. The relationship between culture and
communication is the key factor to understanding intercultural
communication.
1.1.2 Definition of Intercultural Communication
Once we understand the meaning of communication and culture it
becomes clear that intercultural communication refers to the
communication between people from two different cultures. (Chen Guoming
& Starasta, 1998:28) Intercultural communication refers to communication
between different socio-cultural groups. Samovar (1981:19) claims that
intercultural communication occurs “whenever a message that
must be
understood is produced by a member of one culture for consumption by a
member of another culture”. Precisely speaking, intercultural
communication is the communication between people whose cultural
perceptions and symbols are distinct enough to change communication
events.
The term “intercultural communication” includes the entire range
of communication across boundaries of groups or discourse systems, form
cultural groups to the communication which takes place between men and
women. In linguistic, one can explain intercultural communication as
taking place whenever participants introduce different knowledge into
the interaction which is specific to respective socio-cultural groups.
Increasing the shared cultural knowledge is essential in communication,
because language is intrinsically ambiguous. Since meanings are
constructed jointly by the speaker and the listener, it is always
necessary for the receiver to draw inferences about the intentions of
the sender.
1.1.3 Three Elements of Intercultural Communication
Culture is very complex and influences people?s life in every aspect.
There are many important elements contained in the study of
intercultural communication. Among them, perceptual process, verbal
process and nonverbal process are three main elements. Perception is the
internal process by which people select, evaluate, and organize stimuli
from the external environment. It is the process by which people
construct their unique social realities by attributing meanings to
social objects and
events they encounter in their environment. It is an extremely
important aspect in communications. There are three major elements that
have direct influences on the development of people?s perception; they
are belief/value/attitude systems, world view and social organization.
As far as belief is concerned, there are no right or wrong judgments in
matters of intercultural communication. If someone believes that voices
in the wind can lead one?s behaviors in the right way, no one can say
the belief is wrong. People should be able to recognize and to deal with
different beliefs if they wish to obtain satisfactory and successful
communications. Value is the valuative aspect of belief/value/attitude
systems. Although everyone has his/her personal values, cultural values
penetrate personal values. Cultural values are a set of organized rules
for people to make choices, reduce uncertainty and conflicts within a
certain society. These values are generally normative, which inform the
member of a culture what is good and bad, right and wrong, true and
false, etc. they also specify what behaviors are important and what
should be avoided. Belief and value contribute to the development of
attitudes. An attitude may be defined formally as a learned tendency to
respond in a constant manner to a given object of orientation. In other
words, people tend to avoid those things they dislike and to keep those
they like.
World view is one of the most important elements formed in the
perceptual aspect of intercultural communication. It deals with a
cultural orientation toward such philosophical issues as God, humanity,
nature and the universe. World view has a deep influence on culture and
intercultural communication. Social organization is the place in which a
culture organized its institutes and affects how members of the culture
perceive the world and how they communicate. Family and school are two
dominant social organizations which influence the development of values
and the pursuing of goals.
The second element of intercultural communication is verbal process,
which includes not only how people talk with each other, but the
internal activities of thinking to interact with others. Verbal language
is an organized system used to represent human experiences within a
geographic or cultural community. In fact, language is the primary
vehicle by which one culture transmits its beliefs, values, and norms.
The third element of intercultural communication is nonverbal
process. Although verbal process is the primary means for communication,
nonverbal process is important in intercultural communication as well.
Nonverbal process consists of the following topics: gestures, facial
expressions, eye contact, silence, space, time and paralanguage.
1.2 Pragmatic Failure in Intercultural Communication
Learning a foreign language well means more than merely mastering
the pronunciation, grammar, words and idioms. It means learning also to
see the world as native speakers of that language see it, learning the
ways in which their language reflects the ideas, customs and behavior of
their society, learning to understand their ”language of mind”.
Because of cultural differences, misunderstandings and
miscommunications may arise in spite of grammatically correct
utterances. The same words or expressions may not mean the same thing to
people from different cultures. A serious question may not cause
seriousness, and a happy statement may cause unhappiness or anger
because of cultural differences. Among these errors, pragmatic failures
derived from cultural transfer are more serious in that they contribute
to communicative failure directly in intercultural communication.
1.2.1 Definition of Pragmatic Failure
If people fail to achieve the desired communicative effect in
communication, pragmatic failure will be likely to occur. It can be
summarized that they are unable to understand what is meant by what is
said. Jenny Thomas (1983:91-
94) defines pragmatic failure as “the
inability to understand what is meant by what is said” and she notes
that pragmatic failure
has occurred on any occasion ”on which the
hearer
perceives the forces of the speaker?s utterances as other than the
speaker intended he or she should perceive it”. Li Yuansheng (2004: 27)
defines pragmatic failure as follows: Pragmatic failure is those
failures (excluding linguistic errors such as ungrammaticality and
misspelling) committed in the process of understanding or expressing
utterances (both verbal and non-verbal).
The definition of pragmatic failure can be understood from four
aspects. Firstly, pragmatic failure can be studied in two senses. In a
broad sense, it includes all the errors in language use, such as
spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes and discourse mistakes. In a
narrow sense, it indicates not grammaticality but acceptability of
language use. Secondly,
of language use
can be considered as the result of language users' violation of the
principle of appropriateness. In other words, language users violate
interpersonal norms and neglect social cultural context and concrete
communicative occasions out of unconsciousness or for the purpose of
obtaining certain effect. Thirdly, the judgment of pragmatic failure is
speaker- oriented without consideration of the hearer's comprehensive
ability and process, though the ultimate judgment of failure depends on
perlocutionary act. Thus, whether communication is successful or not
depends on whether the communicative value (A) of the language used is
equivalent to the intended meaning (B) of the speaker. If C is used to
stand for the unintended meaning of the speaker, pragmatic failure can
be formulated as: A=B+C or A=C (Sun Y and Dai L., No. 3, 2002). Finally,
the categorization of pragmatic failure is in terms of different
criteria. In intercultural communication, according to Jenny Thomas's
theory, pragmatic failure is often divided into pragmalinguistic failure
(on account of language users' improper assurance of linguistic context)
and sociopragmatic failure (on account of language users' improper
assurance of social cultural context). Pragmalinguistics, in Leech?s
definition, refers to our linguistic knowledge of language use, and
sociopragmatics is related with how our sociological knowledge
influences our interaction (Leech, 1983:10). In China, according to the
criterion of whether communication occurs in the
same cultural context or in cross-cultural context, pragmatic
failure is divided into intralingual pragmatic failure and interlingual
pragmatic failure. Since this thesis mainly deals with intercultural
communication, Jenny Thomas's theory is adopted.
1.2.2 Classification of Pragmatic Failure
As Thomas pointed out, pragmatic failure refers to the inability to
understand “what is meant

by what is said”. She further divided
pragmatic failures into two types:
pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure (Thomas,
1983:95). This distinction can, of course, cover any sort of pragmatic
failures and therefore is adopted by many scholars (e.g. Hu Wenzhong,
Huang Cidong, etc.) in their study of pragmatic failures. Sun Ya and Dai
Lin (2002) distinguished pragmatic failure in the broad sense and in the
narrow sense in their survey of pragmatic studies in china. Qian
Guanlian (2001) noticed that pragmatic failure can be divided into
pragmatic failure in intercultural communication and pragmatic failure
within the same mother tongue communication, or in SunYa?s term inter-
lingual pragmatic failure and
intra-lingual pragmatic failure. Based on their research findings,
the author arranged and grouped the data collected into 3 categories,
namely, pragmalinguistic failure, sociopragmatic failure, and value-
related behavioral failure.
2 Expressing Forms of Intercultural Pragmatic Failure
There are various expressing forms of pragmatic failure. And we will
discuss some of them in this section.
2.1 Pragma-linguistic Failure
Pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics belong to two sub-branches of
general pragmatics. Leech (1983:11) points out the distinction between
pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. In Leech?s definition, the term
pragmalinguistics “can be applied to the study of the more linguistic
end of pragmatics- where we consider the particular resources which a
given language provides for con
veying particular illocutions”.

Pragmalinguistic failure occurs “when the pragmatic force mapped by
a speaker onto a given utterance is systematically different from the
most frequently assigned to it by a native speaker of the target
language, or when speech act strategies are inappropriately transferred
from L1 to L2”(Thomas, 1983:95). To make it easier, pragmalinguistic
failures are caused by people?s different understanding on a linguistic
token or structure. They have something to do with linguistic features
such as sentence structure and lexical connotations. Pragmalinguistic
failure may arise from two identifiable sources: teaching-induced errors
and pragmalinguistic transfer. The latter refers to “the inappropriate
transfer of speech act strategies from one language to another, or the
transferring from the source language to the target language of
utterances which are semantically/syntactically equivalent, but which,
because of ?interpretive bias?, tend to convey a different pragmatic
force in the t
arget language.” (Thomas, 1983:101)

2.2 Socio-pragmatic Failure
Compared to pragmalinguistic failure, sociopragmatic failure
involves not only students? linguistic knowledge of the target language
but also students? culture knowledge of the target language.
Sociopragmatic failure is caused by mistakes which arise from
intercultural different assessments within the social parameters
affecting linguistic choice--size of imposition, social distance between
speaker and hearer, relative rights and obligations, etc. Because of the
different cultural backgrounds and social conventions, people respond to
the same utterance differently. Chinese culture has been rooted in our
mind so that we always behave according to the rules and principles of
the society. The standards to judge what is right and what is wrong have
been acquired since we were born. It?s safe to say that we do things
unconsciously under the control of our own culture. So when two cultures