Negative Pragmatic Transfer And Its Effect On Intercultural Communication

The rapid development of modern economy and technology has brought us into an age of globalization in which we are increasingly in contact with people from other cultures. Human communication becomes more and more frequent. On the stage of"Global Village", intercultural communication plays an important role. However, there is a great potential for communicators to suffer communication breakdowns in intercultural context because of the cultural differences. In intercultural communication, communicators, being deeply influenced by their native cultures, are inclined to transfer their native cultural conventions and linguistic knowledge into communication, thus committing pragmatic failures—failing to understand counterparts'intentions and transmit their actual ideas. Negative pragmatic transfer is always regarded as a prime cause of pragmatic failures and the researches focus of negative pragmatic transfer are mainly on its negative effects on intercultural communication but overlook its positive effects. Therefore, many communicators treat negative pragmatic transfer only as a big barrier in intercultural communication and they fail to make use of its positive effects to facilitate intercultural communication process. This paper holds a dialectic attitude towards the negative effects of negative pragmatic transfer on intercultural communication, and analyzes its positive effects.This paper begins with defining the terms like culture, communication, and intercultural communication and analyzes the current situation of intercultural communication research. According to some sociologists and anthropologists, culture is communication. In intercultural communication, communication acts have different meanings in different cultures because of the cultural differences. It is inevitable that the pragmatic transfer leads to misunderstanding and miscommunication.Pragmatics directs attention to the relation between signs or linguistic expressions and their users, and also plays an important role in intercultural communication. With the development of pragmatics, all kinds of pragmatics emerge one after another. Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) studies interlanguage learners'ability to understand and perform speech acts as well as the development of the ability. This is a rather new emergence which may be...