Pragmatics语用学

摘要：本篇论文旨在探讨中国人讲英语的礼貌问题。

尽管中国人学英语时已经掌握了很多语法知识，但是在实际交际中，在表达的礼貌方面还有很大欠缺。

中国式英语被很多外国人认为很粗鲁。

但是在国内，很多英语学习者和英语教师还没有认识到这个问题。

在同外国人用英语交流时，礼貌问题也影响了中国人在外国的形象。

本文在总结生活实例的基础上，对中英文转化过程中的礼貌问题做出了详细的解释。

本论文对日常言语行为中的礼貌语用失误进行了描述和简单地分析，例如对招呼语，称赞语，告别语，拒绝语，道歉语，请求语等中出现的礼貌语用失误进行阐述。

研究发现，中国人并不是没有礼貌，只是在句子的使用及表达方面未注意到礼貌的问题。

无论是单词还是句式的选择，在英语的礼貌表达上都发挥着很大的作用。

总的来说，本文利用认知语言学的理论和观点来分析英语礼貌问题，为英语的学习与教学，以及跨文化交际等方面提供了参考和借鉴。

关键词：礼貌跨文化日常交际
Abstract: This paper concerns itself with the politeness failure when Chinese speak English. Though Chinese has learned English vocabularies and grammar for many years, the English we speak is not even polite enough for native speakers. According to many natives from English-speaking countries, Chinglish, which is regarded as English of Chinese, is rude and impolite sometimes. However, at home, many English learners and teachers have not realized this issue yet. The politeness failure has influenced the image of China while Chinese communicate with foreigners. Based on the examples from daily life, this paper explains details to the politeness failure during the transforming between Chinese and English. In terms of daily speech acts, such as greetings, compliment, farewell, refusal apology request and so on, pragmatic failures in practice are illustrated and simply discussed. By collecting typical cases from daily life, we find this research that Chinese fail to use sentences in a polite way in the result of unnoticing politeness instead of being rude on purpose. The selection of words and sentence structure make great difference in expression.
In a conclusion, to support the point of this paper, the linguistic cognitive theory is used to analyze the problems existing in Chinglish. This paper presents the discussion of causes and provides a reference for English learning and teaching, as well as
intercultural communication.
Key words: politeness, cross-culture, daily communication
Ⅰ.Introduction
In cross-cultural communication, pragmatic failure in politeness has become an essential problem. However, politeness is the key pragmatic principles in language use, especially in the intercultural communication between different groups. Due to some differences in language, culture, and some living environments, politeness in utterances differ dramatically from one community to another community sharing no universal language. In more and more exchanges，trade businesses and other interactive activities among different countries, different polite philosophy has brought various obstacles for inter-cultural communications. Because of those clear discrepancies from different groups，distinct understanding of communication context and other factors that a great number of pragmatic failures in politeness have become the prevailing phenomena in inter-cultural communication.
Pragmatic failures in polite utterances are unavoidable. Participants as native speakers and those as non-native speakers encounter all kinds of violation of polite principles.Failures in politeness are most reflected in the speech acts to display the intended meanings and to convey the expected ideas. Therefore, the main issue to be discussed in this thesis is narrowed to the specific pragmatic failures in daily life. Ⅱ.Literature Review
A.Politeness Study Abroad
The four conversational maxims proposed by Grice in logic and Conversation (1967) are formulated as quantity maxim, quality maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim. Grice advocates these conversational maxims and the Cooperative Principle (CP) to reveal the ways or the mechanisms by which people interpret implicature to accomplish their conversations. His theory has been seen as pragmatic principles in conversations for interpersonal communications.
But there is another type of implicature that receives no account in the pragmatic theory of the cooperative principle, which is implicature of politeness. As argued by Thomas (1995), politeness as an illocutionary phenomenon, is closely connected with
pragmatics.
Following Thomas, we have grouped the pragmatic approach to politeness under four headings: the conversational maxim view advocated by Leech (1980), the face-management view proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), the conversational-contract view put forward by Fraster (1990)and the pragmatic scales view presented by Spencer-Oatey(1992). Particularly, Leech …s six maxims which include the tact maxim, the generosity maxim, the approbation maxim, the modesty maxim, the agreement maxim and the sympathy maxim are regarded as the politeness principle.
According to Leech, communicators generally observe some rules of good behavior which he terms the Politeness Principle. The principle can explain why people are sometimes indirect in conveying what they mean. It is a necessary complement that may rescue the CP from serious trouble in theorizing.
B.Politeness Study in China
the most worth mentioning is Prof．Gu Yueguo (p237-257)，who summarizes four essential elements of Chinese politeness：respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth and refinement. Later on, Gu (1992) elaborates these four essentials into five maxims of politeness in Chinese, They are Self-denigration Maxim; Address Term Maxim; Refinement Maxim; Agreement Maxim; Virtues-word deeds Maxim.
C.Studies of Pragmatic Failures Abroad
The notion of pragmatic failure has been initially defined by British linguist Thomas in her paper of cross—cultural pragmatic failure. Thomas defines it as “the inability to understand” what is meant by what is said (Thomas, 1983:p91-112). In other words, it means that the speaker‟s utterance is interpreted or understood by a hearer as different from what the speaker intends to be interpreted. So often pragmatic failure occurs in interactions between native and non-native speakers, and it also can be found in cross-cultural communications between native speakers.
D.Studies of Inter-cultural Pragmatic Failure in China
Chinese famous scholar Mr. He Ziran ( 2002) argues that the umbrella notion of pragmatic failure can refer to any failure that speakers have not accomplished the
expected effect in language communications. He remarks that it is not the wrong grammatical structure that leads to inadequate expression of meaning and sense.
Chen Xinren (2004) has also explored pragmatic failures from the aspect of pragmatic competence．He holds that the skills of using language can be seen as pragmatic competence. Language grammar stipulates the correct form and structure of language, and semantic codes regulates that the form must take some meaning or sense.
Ⅲ. The pragmatic failure of politeness in daily life
A.Greeting failure
We are obviously more familiar with some expressions, such as, “hello”, “hi”“I am so sorry”. However, “Good bye” and “See you” is not always equal to the other. Especially when you are a waiter/waitress and the hearer is your customer. The customer can say “See you”when he/she is going to leave. This sentence means he/she likes to be here, and he/she may come here next time. But as a waiter/waitress, using “See you”seems too aggressive; actually, it will make customers feel uncomfortable. The best way, also the simplest way is just say “Bye”.
Similarly, “You are welcome” cannot be used to answer every “Thank you”. It sounds too much formal. You can say “Cheers”or “No worry”. If the hearer likes saying “Thank you”, sometimes you can ignore his/her “thanks”and continue your speech. If you are the customer, there is no necessity to say “You are welcome” to the seller. The better way is just say “Thank you” back.
According to last two examples, we can clearly see that some expressions in English are not as that familiar to us as what we think of. When we are at school or some other training institutions, we are taught their meanings, but those are the semantic meanings, as for pragmatic meaning, we can only get them from foreigner‟s laughter or contempt. Obviously, that is the reason that most foreigners think Chinese rude and impolite.
B.Invitation failure
When you get a good friend who is an America or British, someday, he says”Would you like to have dinner with me in my house?” Unfortunately, you do not have
time to go there. Some people may say “No, thanks. I have another appointment.”Then, congratulations, you probably will not be invited next time. Or even worse, you just lose a friend. How to say “No” politely is a complex skill no matter in China or abroad. In this condition, “Thanks”cannot make up the hurt you have made. In a polite way, you should say” That is a good idea. I would like to join in, but I have another appointment today.” In this way, you show that you are sorry about not going and give a respect to his/her invitation.
C.Request failure
In a restaurant, you want to have a hamburger. You tell the waiter” I want a hamburger”. You are so lucky if he does not treat you like rubbish. It is not a polite way to give a request. Through this way, nothing can even be called “a request”. You should say “Could I have a hamburger, please?”, or “Can I have a hamburger, please?”.
D.Euphemism failure
When British say “I only have a few minor comments”, they mean “Please re-write completely”. But what others understand is “He has found a few typos”. This is a very common phenomenon in daily life. Sometimes, when a British says “Could we consider some other options?”, It means “I do not like your idea” But what others understand is “They have not yet decided.” These two examples show that we cannot get what the British mean completely. Then we should remember more examples.
“That is not bad”means “That is good”. “That is very brave”means “That is very stupid” or “You are insane”. “Quite good” means” a bit disappointment”. “Very interesting” means “That is clearly nonsenses”.
According to these examples, we can see that if we do not know anything about pragmatics, it is very difficult to get what they actually mean. In this condition, pragmatic failure in politeness is inevitable.
Ⅳ. Reason analysis on pragmatic failure in politeness
A.Model Verbs(Model Auxil-iaries)
The cultured westerners would use model verbs more frequently to show their politeness to others. Therefore, model verbs like “can, could, may, might, and would”
will function well in conversations. It sounds more polite to express suggestion, request, willing and so on. For example, “Pass me the salt” is less polite than “Could you please pass me the salt?” apparently.
B.Subjunctive mood
By using words like”would rather, would sooner, would as soon”and “had”which is also called as subjunctive mood. It will cause hearer to feel that you are considering a better result or way to avoid the bad ones. It will also show that you are deducing the probable problems and trying to find a way to solve it.
C.Please
When “please” goes after the sentence, it sounds better than when it goes before the sentence. Because the sentence sounds like an order when you use “please” as the beginning of a sentence. For example, “Could you please reply to me by Monday? Thank you.” is much more polite than “Please reply to me by Monday. Thank you.”D.Passive voice
Sometimes, declarative sentences may be stiff and impolite. This is time to use passive voice or negative sentences or interrogative sentences to show you politeness. In this way, it avoids our subjective opinions and gives the hearer a positive mood. For instance, “Every piece of luggage has to be examined through.” is better than “We will examine every piece of luggage”.
E.Past tense
Similarly, when you use past tense to make a request, it sounds more comfortable and acceptable. For example,”I thought you were needing me, Mr. Smith.”
Ⅴ. Conclusion
Following the definition of pragmatic failures in inter-cultural communication given by Thomas in the 1970s, pragmatic failures in inter-cultural communication has been the hot topic discussed by many scholars more than ever both at home and abroad and many scholars have explored the pragmatic failures from various points of view, such as sociolinguistics, psychology, second language acquisition and so on. This paper mainly investigates the pragmatic failures in politeness, more specifically
in a variety of polite speech acts.
The studies of causes of pragmatic failures in inter-language communication can also be applied to those occurring in the politeness and such traditional causes are generalized into four categories as culture and language differences, language transfer in second language acquisition, teaching induced causes and violation of pragmatic rules in language use. But few scholars turn their attention to causes studies in a cognitive approach. That is a reason why this paper is engaged in the exploration of the causes leading to politeness failures in a cognitive perspective.
The major causes of politeness failures discussed in this paper are concluded as politeness transfer, different culture-based cognitive environment and an improper choice of context. The study of the causes for politeness failures is on the basis of the common politeness failure phenomena in different speech acts. From a cognitive perspective, prototype and category theory as well as cognitive approach on relevance theory are applied to explain the causes for politeness failures in inter-cultural communication between Chinese and English native speakers.
Though, this paper is facilitated with some new perspectives on the analysis of certain causes for politeness failures, there are still some other important causes to generate pragmatic failures, like individual factors, society and others. The focus here is only on three causes, which may be one limitation of this paper. Besides, due to some limitations, no empirical survey is conducted to illustrate the failure phenomenon, and some of those pragmatic failures are collected directly from the books of other scholars, but still they bear pragmatic significance and are scientific enough to be used as evidence in this paper.
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