Pragmatic Failure Of Address Forms In The Joy Luck Club-From The Adaptation Theory

Pragmatic failure, which was first proposed by Jenny Thomas is a common phenomenon in both intracultural and intercultural communication. Pragmatic failure occurs on any occasion on which H perceives the force of S's utterance as other than S intends s/he should perceive it. Thomas distinguished two types of pragmatic failure: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure is comparatively easy to deal with. It is the inappropriate use of language itself because of the interlocutor's inadequate command of the language or the transplant of their mother tongue. Sociopragmatic failure is much more difficult to overcome, which is closely related to culture and involves many aspects of daily communication, such as ways of greeting and addressing people, ways of expressing gratitude and compliments, inquiring or offering, and ways of expressing modesty, etc. Pragmatic failure caused by inappropriate address forms is the focus of this thesis.Pragmatic failure may lead to unpleasant feelings or even anger between interlocutors and lead to communication breakdown. Therefore, it has interested more and more researchers from home and abroad. They have devoted themselves to the investigation of this issue from different perspectives. Inspite of the achievements, there are still deficiencies in their studies. For example, some of them are confined to intercultural communication, without making researches on intracultural pragmatics. And most of the researches are conducted from the perspective of the utterer, without taking the interpreter into consideration. Moreover, the studies on pragmatic failure caused by inappropriate use of address forms are very relatively few.In the course of communication, address forms are the first piece of information transmitted to the interlocutors. The inappropriate use of address forms will cause pragmatic failure. As an important aspect of language, address forms play a crucial role in achieving successful communicative goals. Besides, address forms are frequently and widely used in literary works. Based on Verschueren's adaptation theory, the address forms used in The Joy Luck Club, which is written by Amy Tan, a famous Chinese American woman writer, are carefully studied and the results illustrate: the main cause of pragmatic failure of address forms in the novel is that in the course of communication, the language users, specifically, English readers, Chinese readers (native English speakers who can read English) and the characters in the novel fail to adapt language or behavior to the communicative context, i.e. the mental world, the social world and the physical world. In addition to the exploration on what language users fail to make adaptation to when pragmatic failure arises, the present thesis gives some suggestions to reduce or avoid pragmatic failure and the author believes that they will help interlocutors achieve their communication goals.