A Study On Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure Of Humor With The Principle Of Goal Direction

Pragmatic failure has been an important research subject in the field of cross-cultural communication and pragmatics. Jenny Thomas pointed out that a cross-cultural pragmatic failure might result in serious outcomes."While a grammatical error may reveal a speaker to be a less than proficient language user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him/her as a person."(He Ziran,1988) Due to this fact, Thomas brought forward the notion of pragmatic failure. A large number of linguists, domestic and overseas, have done lots of studies and researches on pragmatic failure, of which the key point is cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Specifically speaking, scholars did their researches concerning cross-cultural pragmatic failure on many aspects, however, as for humor, which plays an important role to create a lively communicating environment and shorten the distances of each other, scholars seldom pay their attention on this respect.Humor is a universal experience. People all over the world enjoy a good laugh. But every culture’s funny bone is tickled a different way. Humor is based on shared experiences and background knowledge. As a result, non-Americans have a hard time seeing why American jokes are funny, even if they know what the words mean, In this thesis, the present researcher is trying to analyze cross-cultural pragmatic failure of humor committed by speakers from different cultural backgrounds when communicating in English, which takes English norm as the criteria because English is the target language chosen as a means of communication. This paper chooses Professor Liao Meizhen’s Principle of Goal Direction as its theoretical foundation; collects a large number of examples from American hot TV drama Friends, analyzes the relation between goal and communication effect and primary aspects of pragmatic failure under the guidance of the viewpoint of goal refusal, goal acceptation and so on. Then it finds out causes of cross-cultural pragmatic failure through the contrast between Chinese and western culture. At last, it poses some strategies to reduce cross-cultural pragmatic failure in order to achieve successful interaction.