阅读7crossculture pragmatic failure.docx

1、阅读7crossculture pragmatic failureCROSS-CULTURAL PRAGMATIC FAILURE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING Gabriela PohlPerhaps the fascination that the study of cross-cultural pragmatics holds for language teachers, researchers, and students of linguistics stems from the serious trouble to which prag

2、matic failure can lead. No error of grammar can make a speaker seem so incompetent, so inappropriate, so foreign, as the kind of trouble a learner gets into when he or she doesnt understand or otherwise disregards a languages rules of use (Rintell-Mitchell, 1989, cited in Trosborg 1994, p. 3). INTRO

3、DUCTION As a migrant to Australia I have long been interested in looking at the sources of misunderstandings which can arise between anglo-saxon Australians and German-background speakers. What is it, which makes some German people, even if fluent speakers of English, come across as serious, blunt,

4、overbearing, even arrogant? How can we better assist second and foreign language students to not only develop linguistic but also inter-cultural competencies? What knowledge, attitudes and skills should a globally competent (Lambert, 1999) person possess? Through my readings, I am increasingly convi

5、nced that the answer lies in the study of cross-cultural pragmatics. As Thomas (1983) has pointed out: Every instance of national or ethnic stereotyping should be seen as a reason for calling in the pragmaticist and discourse analyst! (p. 107). At the beginning of my research I referred to a number

6、of cross-cultural comparative studies which examine specific aspects of pragmatics across various language and ethnic groups, for example: praising and complimenting in the Polish and English language (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989); issues of face in a problematic Chinese business visit to Britain (

7、Spencer-Oatey & Xing, 2000); Japanese and English responses to unfounded accusations (Tanaka, Spencer-Oatey & Cray, 2000); argumentation and resulting problems in the negotiation of rapport in a German-Chinese conversation (Gnthner, 2000); etc. While these studies are very interesting, they were ini

8、tially too specific to assist me in gaining an overview of the issues involved in cross-cultural pragmatics. I therefore decided to start with a search for pragmatic universals, and to move from there towards culture-specific pragmatics, inter-cultural interactions and pragmatic failure, and finally

9、 towards implications for language teaching. This article summarizes my findings along each of these steps. ARE THERE PRAGMATIC UNIVERSALS? Yule (1996, p. 4) describes pragmatics as the study of the relationships between linguistic forms and the users of those forms. While syntax is the study of how

10、 linguistic forms are arranged in sequence, and semantics examines the relationship between linguistic forms and entities of the world, pragmatics is concerned with the notion of implicature, i.e. implied meaning as opposed to the mere lexical meaning expressed (Grice, 1967, cited in Thomas 1995, p.

11、 56). There are times when we say (or write) exactly what we mean, but much more frequently we are not totally explicit, as in the following exchange with is adapted from Wierzbicka (1991, p. 391): Example 1: Two women discussing their children: A: How is Tom going at school?B: Ah, well . you know w

12、hat they say: boys will be boys. A: Yeah, but girls are no easier . you know what Jess did the other day? .Speaker B does not explicitly state how Tom is progressing at school. Still, her remark boys will be boys, which is a tautology and literally quite meaningless, provides sufficient information

13、to her interlocutor for the conversation to continue smoothly. In this case, Speaker B conveyed more than the literal meaning of her words would suggest. At other times the implicature of what is said may be quite different from the meaning of the words used, as in the following example: Example 2:

14、On being disturbed by the next-door neighbours lawnmower early on Sunday morning: A: Great way to wake up! B: (grumpily) Sure is. The above exchange is an example of what Grice has termed conversational implicature, while the use of the word but in the following example provided by Thomas (1995, p.

15、57) is one of conventional implicature: Example 3: My friends were poor, but honest. Regardless of the context in which it occurs, the word but carries the implicature that what follows will run counter to expectations. The expectation in example 3 being, that poor people are dishonest. Obviously, l

16、anguage users must share certain rules and conventions which enable them to understand one another in the many instances where the meaning and the intent, i.e. the illocutionary force (Yule, 1996, p. 48), of utterances are not explicitly stated. In his text Logic and conversation Grice (1975, cited

17、in Thomas 1995, pp. 61-63) suggests four conversational maxims and the Cooperative Principle (CP) to explain the mechanisms through which people interpret implicature. Grices Cooperative Principle states: Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted pu

18、rpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Grices formulated the conversational maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner as follows: Quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange). Do not make your contribution

19、more informative than is required.Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.Relation: Be relevant.Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. Grice (1975, cited in Thomas 1995

20、, p. 65) proposed that speakers frequently and blatantly fail to observe any of above conversational maxims to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from, or in addition to, the expressed meaning. Looking back at example 2 above, a pragmatically competent listener is most likely

21、 to interpret the speakers utterance of Great way to wake up! as a sarcastic remark and to understand that the speaker is expressing annoyance at being woken up by the neighbours lawnmower. However, a second language learner, even if s/he is quite fluent in English, may not necessarily arrive at the

22、 same conclusion. Like Grice, other writers have attempted to formulate universals in language use. Brown and Levinson (1987, cited in Spencer-Oatey 2000, pp. 12-13) propose the concept of face as a universal human need and the key motivating force for politeness and rapport management. They maintai

23、n that face consists of two related aspects: negative face representing the desire for autonomy, and positive face representing the desire for approval. However, Brown and Levinson as well as Grices have their critics. Linguists such as Matsumoto (1988), Ide (1989) and Mao (1994, all cited in Spence

24、r Oatey 2000, p. 13) refer to the importance of social identity as a concept in Japanese and Chinese society, which has been omitted in Brown and Levinsons notion of face. Similarly, Wierzbicka (1991, pp. 67-68) describes aspects of Grices and Brown and Levinsons work as ethnocentric with a strong a

25、nglo-centric bias and cautions against attempts to formulate language universals at the expense of culture-specifics. Another attempt at finding language universals was made by Leech (1983, cited in Spencer-Oatey 2000, p. 39), who formulated six politeness maxims as follows: 1. TACT MAXIMa. minimize

26、 cost to otherb. maximize benefit to other 2. GENEROSITY MAXIMa. minimize benefit to selfb. maximize cost to self 3. APPROBATION MAXIMa. minimize dispraise of otherb. maximize praise of other 4. MODESTY MAXIMa. minimize praise of selfb. maximize dispraise of self 5. AGREEMENT MAXIMa. minimize disagr

27、eement between self and otherb. maximize agreement between self and other 6. SYMPATHY MAXIMa. minimize antipathy between self and otherb. maximize sympathy between self and other. Leech (1983, cited in Bond, Zegarac & Spencer Oatey 2000, p. 56) proposes that the maxims of politeness work in conjunct

28、ion with Grices four conversational maxims, above, but concedes that they may vary in importance from culture to culture. For example, in the context of responding to compliments, the Modesty Maxim clearly outweighs the Agreement Maxim in Japanese society, while in English-speaking societies it is c

29、ustomarily more polite to accept a compliment graciously, i.e. to find a compromise between violating the Modesty Maxim and violating the Agreement Maxim (Leech, 1983, p. 137). Clearly, it is difficult if not impossible to come up with universally applicable rules for language use as each culture ha

30、s more or less culture-specific pragmatic features. CULTURE-SPECIFIC PRAGMATIC FEATURES Many culture-specific pragmatic features are implicit, but they are nonetheless central in communicative encounters. The following are just some examples: mental sets: a frame of mind involving an existing dispos

31、ition to think of a problem or a situation in a particular way (Sternberg, 1995, cited in Zegarac & Pennington 2000, p. 166); e.g. what is the meaning of an offer of coffee after a meal; is it an invitation by the host to stay a little longer or a polite hint to guests that it is time to leave? sche

32、mata: a pre-existing knowledge structure in memory involving a certain pattern of things (Yule, 1996, p. 88); e.g. what constitutes an apartment, a holiday, a school, a restaurant etc. scripts: a pre-existing knowledge structure for interpreting event sequences (Yule, 1996, p. 87); e.g. a visit to the doctor, shopping at a supermarket, phoning to make an appointment at a hairdressing salon, etc. speech events: a set of circumstances in which people interact in some conventional way to arrive at some outcome (Yule, 1996, p. 57); eg.