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Date Posted: 16:07:20 10/04/09 Sun
Author: Maria de Lourdes
Subject: Discourse issues in cross - Cultural Pragmatics

Hi everyone,

At first, congratulations my dear mates on your fantastic presentation.
Flavia, my dear nice daughter, I miss you a lot.

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. It is concerned with the way language is used to communicate rather than the way it is structured. Cross-Cultural pragmatics refers to the situations between different cultures or languages, and cross-cultural pragmatic failure generally refers to the interpreters' misuse or misunderstanding of mother language.
It has become common to state that there is a close relationship between language and culture.
Different groups within each culture have different expectations about what kind of language is appropriate to particular situations. We must attempt to understand the meanings of words and the utterances very precisely in order to express them in another language.
The word in the mother language may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target one. The concept in question may be abstract or concrete; it may relate to a religious belief, a social custom, or even a type of food.Such concepts are often referred to as "cultural-specific."
The target language may make more or fewer distinctios in meaning than the mother language does. What is regarded as an important distinction in meaning in one language may not be perceived as relevant in another language.
If the target language equivalent is neutral compared the mother language item, the communicator can sometimes add the evaluative element by means of a modifier or adverb if necessary, or building it in somewhere else in the text.
Since the communicators don't know each other's cultural background and the differences between their principles in communications such as different social values, different social customs and different social status, the socio-pragmatical failure is caused naturally during their communications.
Different cultural background has different customs, ways of life, thoughts and so on. Among the cross-cultural communication, the communicators have ignored the differences between their cultural backgrounds and then the social pragmatic failure is brought out.
Another socio-pragmatics failure is caused because the speaker or the interpreter has ignored the status of their partner, or has taken improper ways of expressing, which is too polite to the acquaintances or to those whose social status is quite low, or too casual to the strangers.
Though it is unavoiidable to make pragmatic failure during cross-cultural communicaton, we should consider how to improve the ability of cross-cultural communication since we are second-language learners. But before we submit specific techniques for improving our cross-cultural skills, we need to offer a few qualifications related to the issue of to become a more competent communicator.
The most important way of how to improve the ability of the cross-cultural communication is following some basic advice such as knowing ourselves, considering the physical and human setting, seeking a shared code, developing empathy, encouraging feedback, and learning about cultural adaptatiuon, and so on. It has become necessary to us to improve the ability of cross-cultural communication.
As we know, cross-cultural communication means communication among the people who have different cultural backgrounds, and it stands for the improvement on the quality of linguistic pragmatism.
In cross-cultural communication, one can tolerate a grammatical mistake but not a pragmatic failure.
We as educators and educators the world over have the potential and a responsibility to contribute towards inter-cultural understanding and to assist the students in the development of global competencies.
How can we better assist second and foreign language students to not only develop linguistic but also inter-cultural competencies?

See you.

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