A Study Of Pragmatic Failure In Intercultural Communication From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Since Noam Chomsky (1965) introduced the term "linguistic competence" to the studies of linguistics and made the distinction between "competence" and "performance", the notion of "competence" has aroused many researchers' interests, who endeavor to explore the possible components of language competence. In the field of pragmatics, great achievements have been made. The theoretical development of linguistics and pragmatics makes it possible for a systematic and all-round interpretation of language use.For Chinese EFL learners, one of the major tasks is to improve their intercultural communication competence. This thesis aims to analyze the root causes of pragmatic failure in intercultural communication by means of theoretical and case study. With Jeff Verschueren's Adaptation Theory as its theoretical framework, taking into account the full complexity of both contextual and structural correlates, present paper will interpret pragmatic failure in a more generalized and scientific way. Contextual correlates include the mental world, the social world and the physical world; structural correlates include word level, sentence level and discourse level. When analyzing these six aspects, relevant cases are offered for vivid and forceful interpretation.After that, the focus is shifted to reflections on language classroom and improvement of intercultural communication competence as the ultimate purpose of this paper is to suggest tentative approaches regarding teaching pragmatic knowledge in class. Teachers' analyzing of conversational implicature, implementing interactive book reading and integrating cultural components into second language curriculum, all intend to find a way to improve Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic awareness, thus to avoid pragmatic failure and communication breakdown in intercultural interaction.