Abstract: With the development of society and technology, the communication techniques are getting more improved. What’s more, the process of globalization is increasingly advanced day by day. These factors all make the international communication between peoples from the whole world become more and more frequent. No matter in which aspect, politics, commercial or just travel, it all needs people’s communication and cooperation. However, as different countries have different cultures, the social rules people obey when they speak are absolutely different from each other. It is the same with people’s ways of thinking in every culture. There is no doubt that it will bring trouble to the cross-cultural communication. If we know little about the differences about the countries’ culture and values, pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication will easily take place.

     This thesis mainly compares and analyses the pragmatic failures between the Chinese and English communication, the logic analysis will be adopted to get the factors of influencing the pragmatic failures. Meanwhile to let people realize the importance of possessing a knowledge of a country’s culture, social rules, ways of thinking as well as values to cross-cultural communication. During the process of English teaching, teachers should put emphasis on the cultural background of western countries as well as the agreed social rules used among people while speaking. It can efficiently decrease the pragmatic failures in the communication between Chinese and English, which may also better achieve the goal of successful communication.

Key words: cross-cultural communication pragmatic failures successful communication

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1.Introduction 5

2.Definitions .5

2.1 Culture 5

2.2 Communication .5

   2.3 Cross-cultural communication 7

3. The pragmatic failure and its classification .7

   3.1 The definition of pragmatic failure .7

   3.2 The classification of pragmatic failure.7

4. The reasons for pragmatic failures 9

   4.1 Lack of culture background of western countries .9

   4.2 The influence of mother tongue strategy migration 10

   4.3 The distinction of thinking mode and cultural tradition 11

5. The methods of decreasing pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication 11

5.1 Having a basic knowledge of culture of western countries 12

   5.2 Decreasing the influence of mother tongue strategy migration 12

6. The revelation for English teaching and learning.13

   6.1 For the teachers .13

   6.2 For the students .14

7. Conclusions .15

8. References 15

9. Acknowledgement .16