A Pragmatic Failure Analysis Of And Used In English-Major Students' Thesis Abstracts

And, as a conjunction or a linking word, is considered to be one of the most widely usedwords in English written language or spoken language. It links two or more elements of equalimportance in structure whatever these elements are words, phrases, clauses or sentences. Theconjunction and seems easy to be used, but the language learners sometimes fail to use it inan appropriate way. The problems of using and often occur at a pragmatic level. This thesisaims to analyze the pragmatic failure in the use of and in thesis abstracts written byEnglish-major EFL learners.The thesis analyzes the use of and by focusing on the causes resulting in the pragmaticfailures produced in the abstracts. It combines the theory of pragmatic failure analysis alongwith the theory of the pragmatic function of the conjunction and. As for the research method,it is designed to present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data.From the analysis of the data, three types of pragmatic failures are found and they are:symmetry violation, transitivity violation and addition violation. In addition, the quantitativeanalysis shows that the higher-level English-major EFL learners tend to produce lesspragmatic failure than the lower-level English-major EFL learners. The factors which causethese pragmatic failures are also discussed. They are mainly: lack of the discourse knowledge,lack of the inner logic of the conjunction and, interference of the Chinese way of thinkingand expressing, and lack of English proficiency. At last, this thesis discusses the strategies tosolve these problems: training the vigorous logical thinking ability, explaining the differencesbetween English way of thinking and Chinese way of thinking, and combining the teachingof reading, vocabulary and writing together.The last part of this thesis points out the limitation of this study and the future trends ofthe pragmatic failure research.