The child produces the utterance to request his mother to buy him a ten-speed bicycle, but the mother changes tactfully the child’s “locutionary” meaning to answer “the perlocutionary” meaning.
To infer the speaker’s intended meaning from the perspective of illocutionary acts, the hearer learns to distinguish what kinds of speech acts have been performed, i.e. declaration, assertion, request or warning. It is also essential to rely on mutual background knowledge to predict new information and form the habit of communicating on the basis of context.
As the indirect speech act theory states, non-conventional speech act are more complex and uncertain, and the interpretation of such utterances will largely rely on mutual background knowledge and context. Sometimes unconventional indirect speech acts are apt to lead to inconsistency between the speaker’s illocutionary force and the hearer’s interpretation of such intentions. Therefore, the teacher should not only help the students tackle the hindrance of language points and techniques, but also enhance their pragmatic awareness.
3 Explorations into Pragmatic Failure
In terms of pragmatic failure, there are mainly two types: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Pragmalinguistic failure is basically a linguistic problem, caused by differences in the linguistic encoding of pragmatic force; sociopragmatic failure stems from interculturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior (Thomas, 1983, 99). [4] They reflect two fundamentally different types of pragmatic decision-making．To distinguish the two, teachers have to make a more profound impression on how to equip students with wise pragmatic decision. But my purpose of observing the two notions here is not to further analyze them but to elicit the possible causes, which may impede the enhancement of learner’s pragmatic competence and seek for the effective approaches to reduce or avoid pragmatic failure in real communication.
3. 1 Pragmalinguistic Failure
Pragmalinguistic failure occurs when the pragmatic force mapped by S onto a given utterance is systematically different from the force most frequently assigned to it by native speakers of the target language, or when speech act strategies are inappropriately transferred from L1 to L2(Thomas, 1983: 99). [4] It may arise from two identifiable sources: teaching-induced errors and pragmalinguistic transfer (i.e., inappropriate transfer of speech acts from one language to another). Some teaching techniques may actually increase the likelihood of pragmalinguistic failure. Kasper (1 981), in a most interesting and comprehensive survey, has identified some of what she terms “teaching-induced errors” attribute to teaching materials (inappropriate use of modals), others to classroom discourse (1ack of marking for modality, complete sentence responses and inappropriate prepositional explicitness). English textbooks in high schools have imbued students with such ideas as “whenever speaking English, you should speak complete sentences; the more complete, the better.” However, the fact is that complete sentence responses violate the textual pragmatic “principle of economy” (Leech, 1983). [3] Thus misinterpretation often occurs in interaction. Take the following dialogue as example:
(6) A: Have you finished your homework?
B: Yes. I have finished my homework.
Here “Yes/Yes, I have.” is the proper and adequate answer to the above question. The complete response in the example, otherwise, implies B’s being petulant to give a reply.
Another source of teaching-induced failure can be indicated by placing too much emphasis on metalinguistic knowledge, which frequently leads Chinese learners to deep-rooting in their mind the assumption that the grammatical category “the imperative” is equivalent to the speech act “ordering”. For instance, the everyday use of the imperative “Come in” is scarcely seen as an ordering.
Another frequent cause of pragmatinguistic failure can look into the inappropriate transference of speech act strategies from L 1 to L2. A typical example of the transfer of syntactically equivalent structure would be “Can you X?” likely to be interpreted by native speakers as a request to do X rather than a question as to one’s ability to do X. The following conversation between two family members at table can provide a clue.
(7) A: Can you pass me the salt?
B: Yes. I can pass you the salt.
Here A is actually making a request. B may properly react by saying “Yes/Yes, I can.” with the action of passing the salt or simply the action. Otherwise, the response in the example implies either unsuccessful interpreting S's intention (if without any action while answering) or H’s being impatient or unwilling to do so. And also, native speaker’s usual way of inquiring into linguistic meaning by asking “What’s that mean, X?” or “W hat does X mean?” can often be misinterpreted by Chinese learners as “W hat do you mean by X?” This interrogative sentence is in essence querying or even provoking S. These are the kinds of conventional errors Chinese learners would make in high frequency. Ironically, such misleading patterns can be seen at times in oral English textbooks. For example, in Spoken English Self-taught (Book One, FLTRP) (Yu Zhiyuan, 1995: 223, 229), the practice activity “Key Structures- Asking for clarification” shows:
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