Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure in Jordanian Media Discourse

Abstract

Cultural differences are brought to attention basically in cross-cultural communication where members of each culture start to compare and contrast their culture to the cultures of their addressees. While some cultures like Arabic can be described as high context cultures for basically depending on non-verbal communication, other cultures might be low context cultures for relying basically on words. In cross-cultural communication, i.e. communication between speakers from different cultural backgrounds, speakers are not expected to find it difficult to understand their addressees as long as they have the required semantic and pragmatic competence. The present study examines the occurrence of cross-cultural pragmatic failure in a Jordanian social drama focusing on how pragmatic failure might contribute to communication breakdown. It is an attempt to identify aspects and sources of pragmatic failure in both Arabic and English, and to investigate how cultural factors might influence language use of native and non-native speakers. Keywords: Pragmatic failure; cross-cultural communication; politeness; sociolinguistics.