Speech Act Theoretical Analysis Of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure

The concept of pragmatic failure was first put forward by Jenny Thomas in herpaper “Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure”. After her paper was published in AppliedLinguistics in1983, this concept was extensively accepted by the academic community.Pragmatic failure, in Thomas’s view, refers to the mistakes in which people failed to getperfect communication effects. The definition she provided from the perspective oflisteners is “the inability to understand what is meant by what is said”, and she dividedpragmatic failure into two types, i.e. pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmaticfailure.(Thomas,1983) From then on, pragmatic failure became one of the importantparts of cross-cultural pragmatics. Fundamentally, pragmalinguistic failure means thatspeakers can not use language structural rules known by them felicitously, or rather,speakers can not use the language structures that native speakers will use in the samesituation when they are expressing a special intention or performing a certain speech act.Sociopragmatic failure places great emphasis on social contacts and mainly refers tospeech acts both parties in social situations understand and express according to theirown value orientation, neglecting the other’s value orientation, and it is caused byimproper usage of social rules. Pragmatic failure, in some way, is caused by the speaker’sfailure to deliver illocutionary force correctly with his locutionary act, or theillocutionary force isn’t understood and accepted, which leads to communication failure.In cross-cultural communication, illocutionary force is always likely to be lost because ofdifferent cultural backgrounds, thinking patterns and value orientations, thus pragmaticfailure occurs.This thesis aims to study various causes of pragmatic failure by using speech acttheory to analyze pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure in cross-culturalcommunication, hoping to better guide people’s cross-cultural communication.This thesis consists of three parts: an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion.The main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction. This part mainly introduces the concept of pragmaticfailure, Thomas’ partition of pragmatic failure and home and abroad scholars’ researchstatus about pragmatic failure, and points out this thesis’s theoretical support, theuniqueness of the research and enlightenment significance. The second part is the main body which consists of three chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces speech act theory and pragmatic failure. As forspeech act theory, this chapter represents Austin’s dichotomy of speech acts whichincludes constatives and performatives and his later trichotomy of speech acts, i.e.locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act, and emphasizes the importantrole of illocutionary force in understanding speech acts. Then this chapter describesSearle’s contribution to the development of speech act theory, in which he dividedillocutionary acts into five types. As for pragmatic failure, this chapter discusses referent,indication range, characteristics and manifestation of pragmalinguistic failure andsociopragmatic failure respectively，which aims to better distinguish them.The second chapter analyzes pragmalinguistic failure via speech act theory.Pragmalinguistic failure is mainly manifested on three levels: on phonetic level, thischapter contrasts different phonetic appearances between Chinese and English andmainly analyzes pragmatic failure caused in aspects of stress and intonation; onvocabulary level, this chapter contrasts Chinese-English different vocabulary systemsand analyzes pragmatic failure caused by Chinese-English different vocabularyconnotative meaning; on grammatical level, this chapter distinguishes Chinese-Englishdifferent grammatical structure and expression patterns, and analyzes pragmatic failurecaused by Chinese-English grammatical diversity.The third chapter analyzes sociopragmatic failure via speech act theory. Becausecultural societies are different from each other in aspects such as cultural orientation, lifestyles, values, thinking patterns, social norms and so on, people’s understanding andutilization towards different speech acts are entirely different. So it is hard to avoidpragmatic failure. In Chinese-English communication, pragmatic failure always appearsin concrete social speech acts such as greetings, compliments, requests, and invitations.This chapter mainly does some concrete analysis on common pragmatic failure in severalconcrete social speech acts respectively.The fourth chapter is enlightenment we get from the analysis of pragmatic failure byusing speech act theory, which is shown in three aspects: firstly, enlightenment aboutattitude towards pragmatic failure; secondly, enlightenment about foreign languageteaching; thirdly, enlightenment about cultural exchange. The last part is conclusion. This part simply summarizes the basic content andresearch significance. By analyzing pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failurevia speech act theory, it reveals the problems that we should pay attention to in futureforeign language learning and cross-cultural communication.