Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure

By Jenny A. Thomas. 1983

/ have given the term pragmatic failure' to the inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'. In this paper I argue that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers. I suggest that there is one area of pragmatic failure ('pragmalinguistic failure') which is fairly easy to overcome. It is simply a question of highly conventionalized usage which can be taught quite straightforwardly as 'part of the grammar'. The second area ('sociopragmatic failure') is much more difficult to deal with, since it involves the student's system of beliefs as much as his/her knowledge of the language. I argue that it is essential to avoid prescriptivism in this very sensitive area of language in use. To do so we must draw on insights from theoretical pragmatics and develop ways of heightening and refining students' metapragmatic awareness, so that they are able to express themselves as they choose.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing

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Citations in the corpus

Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models (2021, background): “First, under this definition, toxicity judgements are subjective, and depend on both the raters evaluating toxicity and their cultural background (Thomas, 1983), as well as the inferred context.”
XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning (2020, background): “In fact, the expectations about typical situations vary cross-culturally (Thomas, 1983).”
Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP (2022, background): “Thomas (1983) refers to this as pragmatic failure , namely the “inability to understand ‘what is meant by what is said”’, due to how it is being said.”
‘I just need more time’: A study of native and non-native students' requests to faculty for an extension (2010, background): “Yet the learners may not only fail to accomplish their communicative goals, but their deviations from the target language can lead both to pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure (Thomas 1983).”
Validity argument for assessing L2 pragmatics in interaction using mixed methods (2015, background): “In addition to appropriate language use, one’s social perceptions and sensitivity toward situations (i.e., sociopragmatics, Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983) also constitute pragmatic competence in interaction.”
Learning to Request in a Second Language (2003, background): “Since nonconventionally indirect strategies, hints, carry multiple pragmatic force (Blum-Kulka, 1989; H. Clark, 1979; Gordon & G. Lakoff, 1975; Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983; Weizman, 1989; 1993), an utterance such as, ‘It’s freezing in here’ conveys more than one meaning.”