Pragmatic Failure
Where a common linguistic or cultural background is not shared between people, cross-cultural tensions occur in terms of the ease with which they can communicate effectively. Culture, which includes world view, belief, values and behavior and so on, can be used as specific paralinguistic and prosodic features such as tone of voice, intonation, gestures, and loudness to establish the meaning of the message or accomplish other conversational results. In other words, tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions, even the clothes we wear, convey meaning. However, each culture conveys this meaning differently. For example, two friends meet and one greets the other by exclaiming “WOW! Linda! What did you do to your hair? I almost didn t recognize you. It looks great” (Wolfson, 1983:82). According to Wolfson (ibid), “the sort of compliment, immediately recognizable to any native speaker of American English by its intonational contour, has more than once been perceived as a serious insult by a nonnative speaker who was unfamiliar with the meaning of the intonation and who could only interpret the words by their literal meaning”.
Tannen (1989:11) claims that differences in speakers conversational styles lead to numerous subtle misunderstanding and misjudgments and the level on which differences occur, and the depth of misunderstanding, are far more extreme in the case of broadly cross-cultural communication. According to Tannen(ibid: 23) indirectness/ ellipsis/ silence can lead to pragmatic failure. Indirectness, which is a function of politeness in many cultures and conveys unstated meaning, can also bring about misunderstandings with more frank native English speakers. Indirectness can be interpreted as violation of the Gricean maxims of quality (truthfulness) and quantity, and lead to suspicion on the part of the English speaker. For example, Japanese do not use “no” directly. Sometimes, it causes cross-cultural communication breakdown in the area of business and can fix “offensive national stereotyping” such as “the obsequious Japanese” (Thomas, 1983:97).
Scollon and Scollon (1983:172) discuss pragmatic failure between people of different groups who come from an inappropriate use of conventional patterns of communication. They discuss the dimension of dominance and submission and the dimension of spectatorship and exhibitionism. They claim that different groups may ‘link’ these two dimensions in different ways. According to them, “British fathers in the family as well as British lectures, editors and others in dominant roles” are “expected to exhibit or display while others watch as spectators”. However, this linkage is different for Americans. According to them, “dominance is ‘linked’ to spectatorship and submission is ‘linked’ to exhibitionism”. Therefore, the result in British-American communication is that British speaker, if he is dominant, expects to display while the American, as subordinate, also expects to display and after all they will unconsciously express disagreement. Consequently, in terms of politeness, pragmatic failure happens and misinterpretation will tend to reconfirm already held stereotypes of the other group.
Kasper (1984:1) indicates two types of second language learner s pragmatic misunderstanding of being unable to distinguish between phatic talk and referential talk, and of missing the intended illocutionary force of indirect speech acts. Kasper points out four reasons of learner s pragmatic failure as follows.