Cross-cultural communication frequently occurs in foreign language learning and using in the 21st century。 People from different cultural background may encounter misunderstanding or even breakdown when communicating with each other in English。 Thus pragmatic errors are produced。 Therefore, only to improve the accuracy of language communication, both sides of communicative intention could be understood and could make certain flawless communication effect。 Therefore, this paper is to comparatively analyze the pragmatic failures in Sino-US communication, to track down the reasons for the pragmatics failures from a cultural viewpoint, to find out the revelation of pragmatic failure in English teaching, and finally further boost mutual understanding。 This paper consists of five parts。 Part one is introduction, part two is comparative analysis of the phenomenons of pragmatic failure in Sino-US cross-cultural communication, part three is reasons analysis of pragmatic failure, part four is enlightenment of the study in foreign language teaching, and finally part five is conclusion。

II。 Comparative Analysis of Pragmatic Failure in Sino-US Cross-cultural Communication

2。1 Pragmatic Linguistic Failure

Pragmatic linguistic failures are more linguistic specific and the failures in the language use itself。 It occurs when communicators can not avail themselves of the same language form and function to make them understood。 It mainly proves itself in the arrangement of phonetics, grammar, lexicon, and discourse and so on, mostly the failures in grammar and lexicon。

    In a general way, we could see pragmatic linguistic failures in our everyday life, such as violating the normal way that a language is used, using Chinglish, only knowing the literal meaning of a whole sentence without knowing the real meaning, ignoring that a whole sentence may have some special meaning in a special situation and without thinking about the situation and the listener。

    The followings are some typical examples for pragmatic linguistic failure:

(1) The following conversation occurs between an American Mr。 Brown and his Chinese colleague Mr。 Yang。

Mr。 Brown: Amount of sales increased by 27% in the first quarter and 。。。

Mr。 Yang: What?

    In Chinese, “what” (什么) is commonly used to demand for repeating something again。 But his words sound abrupt and somewhat rude, and set aside the relationship between the speaker and the hearer。 However in America, speaking “what” sounds like an imposition or command rather than a demand。 It seems very unlikely that it will be used between strangers。 In this instance, the illocutionary force is carried by these both of cross-cultural semantic equivalents。 In fact it will be nice if Mr。 Yang uses the simple expression “ Sorry, but could you repeat that?”

    (2) The following dialogue occurs in the classroom。

    Emma: It is cold here。

Li Ming: Yes, the weather is fairly cold today。

    In this simple and common dialogue has two pragmatic failures。 Firstly, Emma’s intention focus on “here”。 That is to say Emma wanted Li Ming to close the window。 While Li Ming thinks that Emma wants to express the fact of cold in process of understanding。 So Li Ming would not went to close the window, Emma’s intention will not be achieved。 Secondly, Li Ming used the word “fairly” equals the Chinese “非常”, but “fairly” is a very formal language, generally it is not used in spoken English。 It is obvious that Li Ming do not know how correctly use the word “fairly” and leads to communication failure。 Therefore, teachers must pay attention to practical application of language in the process of English teaching。

    (3) “He go, I come。” The sentence is obviously direct approach for translation according to the Chinese “他来，我走”。 While the sentence has a lot of right forms of expression in English, for example, “When he left, I came。” or “Unless he goes, I will not come here。” and so on。 There are many similar kinds of situations that use incorrectly conjunctions in Chinese students’ English composition。 For example, “Because the teacher can give me some documents about this topic, so I need not go to look for them。” Obviously, the author misuses the conjunctions in English。。