| The present study, mainly adopting the framework of 'pragmatic failure' by Jenny Thomas, aims to analyse pragmatic failures, at the angles of cultural transfer, pragmatic competence, interlanguage pragmatics, and change of pragmatic codes. Pragmatic failures, being put in a big background of cross-cultural communication, can be analyzed from different aspects.English teaching in China, under the influence of structuralism in the past, paid less attention to pragmatic teaching and attribute pragmatic errors to insufficient knowledge of English language. Therefore, many English learners often spoke a fluent but inappropriate English because of pragmatic failures.Pragmatic failures are harmful since they tend to cause misunderstanding even hatred between native speakers and Chinese learners, as a result, smooth communication is undermined and harmonious interpersonal relationship become tense.In 1983, Thomas defines and classifies pragmatic failures. She thinks pragmatic failures occur because the meaning the speaker wants the hearer to understand deviates from what the hearer really understands. There are two kinds of pragmatic failures: pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic ones. The former deals with language itself while the latter with culture and its related content. We want to analyze these two pragmatic failures with emphasis on socio-pragmatic failures.Within the framework of pragmatics, the analysis of socio-pragmatic failures is just made through the contrast of the difference of two cultures. In terms of the cross-cultural communication, socio-pragmatic failures are produced because people from different cultures usually understand each other by the eye of their own culture, so misunderstanding easily happens and is hard to clear up.Pragmatic failures can stand for pragmatic competence. The less the learners' pragmatic failures are, the stronger their pragmatic competence becomes. So we are interested in whether learners' pragmatic competence improves with their linguistic competence increasing. What do characteristics and rules govern the development of learners' pragmatic competence? We should resort to a new branch of pragmatics - interlanguage pragmatics.Interlanguage pragmatics studies learners' pragmatic phenomena andfeatures of interlanguage and how they form and develop from the aspect of pragmatics. The objective of interlanguage pragmatics is to expound in detail the understanding and producing of learners' pragmatic phenomena and features. This new discipline belongs to SLA, meanwhile borrows some theories and approaches from cross-cultural pragmatics, and deals with some problems in socio-linguistics, psycholinguistics. Its category of research is mainly speech acts. It adopts three studying approaches: theoretically explaining, contrasting and experiencing. Pragmatic failures are one of the characteristics of interlanguage. By means of pragmatic failures, we try to employ the approach of interlanguage to explore learners' pragmatic features in developing pragmatic competence.When learning a foreign language, we must observe the pragmatic codes of target language. We are more interested in whether the pragmatic codes keep invariable or change with cultural fusion and social development.For the purposes above, we have designed two questionnaires with the questions selected from the works of He Ziran, Helen Oatey and Zhang Weizu. These questions refer to pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic problems. We have chosen the subjects at random from Grade 1 and Grade 4 of English major, Grade 1 of ordinary senior school and native speakers to complete the questionnaire. Then, we study the questionnaires from the angles of cultural transfer, pragmatic competence and interlanguage and pragmatic codes.The conclusion of this approach is:1. Sociopragmatic failures are more difficult to find and overcome because they are concerned with values between two cultures.2. Pragmatic competence improves with learners' linguistic competence going up. It explains that p... |
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