Pragmalinguistic failure: disagreement in chinese learners of spanish as L2

Abstract

Speech acts take part of the illocutionary force; it refers to the intended impact the speaker addresses to the listener, moreover, means the knowledge of communicative action and how is it carried out. For example, the act of disagreement is considered a reactive speech act (Bach & Harnish, 1982), since it needs a prior utterance occurs to determine the statement that the speaker will produce based on his beliefs (constative). Therefore, pragmatic competence is the ability to communicate effectively regarding to the context it occurs (Farnia, Sohrabie & Musarra, 2011). When there is “a misunderstanding in the intended illocutionary, or pragmatic, force of an utterance” (p. 526), is what Holmes and Brown (1976) call pragmalinguistic failure. To state it in another way, pragmalinguistic failure is the misinterpretation of the message that can be caused by: 1) the interlocutor does not share the same background; 2) the speaker did not express the message in the appropriate manner. Mirzaei, Roohani and Esmaeili (2012) claim that L2 speakers find it difficult to convey and interpret the meaning in a communicative interaction due to the lack of this pragmalinguistic knowledge. In the same way, Liu (2004) points out that L2 speaker’s breakdown in communication occurs due to the learners’ interpretation and production of the foreign language features that causes “differences in the linguistic encoding of pragmatic force” (Mirzaei, Roohani & Esmaeili, 2012 p. 80).