An Analysis Of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As cultural presuppositions can be major stumbling blocks on the road to understanding, during the last 20 years or so, pragrnaticians have carried out contrastive research into many different pragmatic features in a very wide range of languages. However, the previous studies were mainly based on Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Theories of Politeness and Brown and Levinson's 'Face' model. This thesis, analyzes the nature and the cause of cross-cultural pragmatic failure from the perspective of Relevance Theory, aiming to provide scientific basis for the research with the aim of contributing to communicative language teaching, but also to demonstrate the interpretative force of Relevance Theory on cross-cultural pragmatic failure.First of all, this thesis believes that Relevance Theory can give a reasonable analysis of both failure and success in cross-cultural communication. The author holds that Relevance Theory can account for cross-cultural pragmatic failure because Relevance is a matter of degree and is universal in language. First, what makes the communicator's utterances relevant or less relevant or irrelevant is the interpreting process available to the hearer in that context. Every utterance comes with a guarantee of its own particular relevance. As the relevance of what is said to a hearer from an alien culture usually costs more effort than it would to one from the same language community, the principle of relevance plays a more important role in measuring the degree of success or failure in cross-cultural communication. Second, RT does not ignore the traditional 'Code-Model' encoding-decoding process. Instead, it regards it as the basis of inferential communication. Utterance interpretation is a kind of cognitive activity. To realize mutual manifestness and ensure the success in communication, what one needs to do is to find the relevance between utterances. So compared with Grice's Cooperative Principle, RT is more intuitive and natural in comprehending cross-cultural communication for the universality of relevance.Secondly, the thesis has elaborated on the nature and the cause of cross-cultural pragmatic failure, the author argues that, according to the Principle of Economy, the goal of communication is not merely to convey information, but to convey it economically. Moreover, the communicator hopes to be optimally relevant with the situation to minimize the expenditure of processing effort. So this relevance, as a matter of degree in terms of contextual effects and processing efforts in utterance interpretation, is the driving force behind pragmatic failure. Resorting to cognitive principles and to the Principle of Relevance, the author views the direct factors which result in failure in cross-cultural communication as: failures to recognize intended assumptions; a dim consciousness of the hearer's abilities of utterance interpretation; failures to share the same implicated premise; inability to determine potential relevance and mismatch of cognitive environments for communicators.Lastly, the thesis, after affirming the strong points of Relevance Theory, has pointed out some shortcomings and limitations of Relevance Theory. The author suggests that cooperation and politeness, which are unexpectedly ignored in Relevance Theory, should be considered in cross-cultural communication because communication is often a face-to-face talk. So, the author thinks RT still has much room for improvement.