Contribution to the panel: Towards a Culture-relevant Interpretation of Utterances or Conversations
Cultural Insensitivity and Pragmatic Failures
----Exploring pragmatic failures in the American Context
He Gang
East China Normal University
The present study takes utterances in the American e-newspapers like //www.nydailynews.com/, www.usatoday.com / as its object of observation and interpretation. Unlike many contemporary colleagues whose primary focuses are on mistakes in cross- or intercultural settings, as has been pioneered in the essay by Jenny Thomas (1983), the author assumes that the real issue of pragmatic failures occurring in social interactions, apparently intra-cultural, deserves serious academic consideration. The author has been observing misfires or poor performances of the Americans as having been reported in the e-media or social media for many years, and realize that a careful cultural pragmatic exploration is extremely necessary. One well-known example is the former Los Angeles Clippers’ boss Sterling who inappropriately questioned her mistress –a Mexican-born black American about the rationality of taking photos with the minorities and showing them on the Instagram, like the following:
(RONALD MARTINEZ/GETTY IMAGESClippers owner Donald Sterling seen with girlfriend V. Stiviano at a 2013 NBA playoff game.)
During the alleged argument with Stiviano, who herself is black and Mexican, Sterling asked, "Why are you taking pictures with minorities? Why?"
Stiviano: "People call you and tell you that I have black people on my Instagram, and it bothers you?"
In a recent situation, something similarly inappropriate occurred.
The Trump White House is facing backlash for failing to mention the killing of 6 million Jews or anti-Semitism in a statement released Friday on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror,” the statement read. (2017/1/30)
And the third is like:
The Yale dean faced backlash from students and faculty alike for Yelp posts containing words like "white trash." A University of Delaware adjunct professor lost her position after claiming Otto Warmbier — an American student who died after being returned from North Korea — got what he deserved.
All the examples and many others show that pragmatic failures should not just be studied cross-/-inter-culturally, they are also intra-cultural pragmatic facts, and definitely deserve careful scrutiny from an academic point or perspective.
Therefore, the present study will first rethink about the definition of pragmatic failures, treating them as firstly a situation-relevant social pragmatic fact but with strong and unavoidable cultural connections, and should be interpreted culturally.
To take a much closer look, one might find pragmatic failures fail to detect or activate contextual features systematically, and an utterance-internal analysis of context-sensitive elements seems possible and plausible.
Then it is feasible to examine what causes a pragmatic or cultural pragmatic failure from the perspective of the speaker, and then the hearer or other interactants, cultural assumptions on interpersonal, social interactions.
Bibliography
John O'Connell, cultural insensitivity, http://nativeopinion.com/blog/2016/1/31/
-
great-example-of-cultural-insensitivity
Milene Mendes de Oliveira, Sociopragmatic failure revisited: the case of intercultural communication between Brazilians and Americans, RBLA, Belo Horizonte, v. 17, n.2, p. 307-334, 2017
Maximino Plata, Cultural Insensitivity in the Classroom: Should It Be a Concern?[J],
Journal of Border Educational Research Volume 9 , Fall 2011.
Yan Qiao, A Case Study of Pragmatic Failures, in International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Intercultural Communication (ICELAIC 2014)
THOMAS, J. Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure. In [J] Applied Linguistics, Oxford Academic, v. 4, n. 2, p. 91-112, 1983.
[Key words] pragmatic failures cultural context cultural insensitivity intraculturality