Abstract
Recently, cultural, economical, and political relations between nations have increased in a noticeable way. People communicate and interact more and more to achieve mutual understanding and hit the target. While communicating, different language users may not understand or misunderstand intentions of their interlocutors. This misunderstanding happens due to the different lexicon used in different linguistic communities that reflect their lifestyle. Some words possess culture-specific meanings that reflect not only ways of living of a certain society but also the way the members of that society think and act. For this reason, intentionally or unintentionally, people apply their native language competence to the foreign language that will likely result in misunderstanding known as pragmatic failure. This article deals with the pragmatic failure on word, sentence and discourse levels. Here, implicit meanings of lexical and grammatical elements in discourses across languages and cultures, namely in the English, Azerbaijani, as well as Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean languages and cultures have been investigated.
Highlights
Pragmatics is a term coined by Morris in 1930
This article deals with the pragmatic failure on word, sentence, and discourse levels
Before discussing the pragmatic failure on word, sentence, and discourse levels, it is important to highlight what can lead to that failure
Summary
Pragmatics is a term coined by Morris in 1930. He considered pragmatics as a subfield of semiotics. According to Hymes (1972), speaker's linguistic competence consists of grammatical competence (intonation, phonology, semantics) and pragmatic competence (effective using and understanding language within a context). The lack of these two competences may lead to pragmatic failure. As for example, in the sentence I meeted him in the street can be grammatically wrong but yet comprehensible In this sentence, “meet” being an irregular verb requires the past tense “met.” making such a mistake is inevitable for non-native speakers. Riley uses the term pragmatic error instead of pragmatic failure (Riley, 1989) By pragmatic error he means using inappropriate and foreign social rules and behaviours in one's culture by non-native users of the language
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