Three Layers of Pragmatic Failure Across Languages and Cultures

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.