时间：2022-07-21 04:05:40
Abstract: Abstract: Politeness, as an observable social phenomenon, is a reflection of specific cultural values in the language. This paper focuses on the pragmatic failure of politeness due to its improper use in the cross-cultural interactions in the hope to raise our awareness of cultural differences in politeness and to promote the cross-cultural communication.
Key Words: politeness; pragmatic failure; cultural differences; cross-cultural communication
I Introduction
Politeness is an observable universal social phenomenon and plays a significant role in human communication: it contributes to establish, maintain or consolidate harmonious interpersonal relationships and facilitate social interactions. Meanwhile, politeness is a reflection of specific cultural values in the language. Thus, while admitting the universality of politeness, we must realize its cultural characteristics. Otherwise, we may well suffer miscommunication and great trouble in cross-cultural communication. In its broad sense, cross-cultural communication occurs whenever people of different cultural backgrounds come into contact with each other.
Because of cultural differences, misunderstandings may arise, although the language used in communication may be faultless. The same words or expressions may not mean the same thing to different peoples. “Because of cultural differences, a serious question may cause amusement or laughter; a harmless statement may cause displeasure or anger” (Deng & Liu 2003:2). As far as linguistic politeness is concerned, it varies greatly with respect to its pragmatic use, realizations and judging standards across cultures. And unawareness of these differences and consequently the improper use of politeness in cross-cultural communication often cause pragmatic failure, an area of communication problems. It may also occur in intra-cultural settings, but is often exacerbated by cultural differences. Therefore, this paper will only deal with pragmatic failure in cross-cultural encounters in order to better our understanding of politeness and facilitate cross-cultural communication.
II Pragmatic Failure
According to Thomas (1983), “pragmatic failure” refers to the situation in which H fails to understand S’s pragmatic meaning or the S’s intention is not correctly understood by the addressee not due to grammatical errors but because of S’s failure in conveying his/her pragmatic force. It constitutes “a very important and much neglected source of cross-cultural miscommunication” in that “unlike linguistic errors, which tend at worst to reflect upon the speaker as a less than adequate user of the language and can be easily detected, pragmatic failure may reflect badly on the speaker as a person” and “is rarely apparent in the surface structure of an utterance”. In other words, pragmatic failure is applied as a moral judgment on the uses and abuses of language and communication, signaling primarily communication mishaps, deviations from certain communicative norms. In this light, if a non-native speaker appears to speak fluently, a native speaker is likely to attribute his/her apparent impoliteness or unfriendliness, not to any linguistic deficiency, but to boorishness or ill-will (Thomas 1983:96). Thus, the study of pragmatic failure deserves special attention and bears a practical significance. According to Thomas, there are two types of cross-cultural pragmatic failure, namely, pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Similarly, the failure caused by the improper use of politeness in English-Chinese cross-cultural communication can also be interpreted from these two aspects.
III Pragmalinguistic Failure of Politeness
This kind of pragmatic failure mainly results from non-native speakers’ unawareness of the natives’ peculiar linguistic conventions. “Pragmalinguistic failure” occurs when the pragmatic force mapped on to a linguistic token or structure is systematically different from that normally assigned to it by native speakers or when non-native speakers improperly transfer speech act strategies from their mother tongue to the target language (Thomas 1983:99). Pragmalinguistic failure is basically a linguistic problem, simply a question of highly conventionalized usage, which can be taught straightforwardly as a part of grammar or knowledge of language. In this case, Clyne (1977) notes that pragmatic failure leads to “communication breakdown”, which is basically attributed to the transference at the linguistic level and the differences in interpreting the pragmatic force of utterances (qtd. in Wolfson 1989:142). For example, the utterance that “I’m sorry to hear that your mother was killed by the bus yesterday” is improper and thus impolite. Though the speaker is good-willed and tries to show his understanding of and sympathy for the addressee’s suffering, the pragmatic force is just opposite because his wording is overly specific and too apparent in such undesirable situations as accidents.
Generally speaking, pragmalinguistic failure concerning politeness is caused by “pragmatic transfer”, “the use of rules of speaking from one’s own native speech community when interacting with members’ of the host speech community or simply when speaking or writing in a second language” (Wolfson 1989:141). Consider the following example (Wang 1998:259-260):
(4) (A manager to a woman secretary in a Chinese-Foreign Joint Venture)
A: Thanks a lot. That’s a great help.
B: Never mind.
Here B directly transfers the corresponding response to the expression of gratitude from her first language, “mei guanxi” or “buyong xie” in Chinese, which is highly dissimilar from the conventionalized responses used by the native speakers of English. In this case, English people conventionally respond by saying “That’s all right.”, “It’s my pleasure.” or other expressions of this sort, while B improperly uses the English formulaic response “Never mind.” which is used to answer one’s apology and to ease the speaker. Though “never mind” and “mei guanxi” seem to be similar at the semantic or structural level, they are diversely different in the illocutionary force.