A socio-pragmatic comparative study of

2.9. Pragmatic Failure 
Pragmatic failure (also referred to as pragmatic error) (cf. Richards, Platt, and Platt, 
1992: 127) refers to the speaker's production of wrong communicative effects through 
the faulty use of speech acts or one of the rules of speaking. Thomas (1983) draws on 
the study of sociolinguistic miscommunication. She uses the term "pragmatic failure" to 
refer to the inability of the individual to understand what is meant by what is said. 
Particularly interesting about Thomas's description of pragmatic failure is the 

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CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE 
21
dichotomy between two types of pragmatic failure. She makes this distinction on the 
basis of the difficulty of analysis and possible remedies in terms of both the 
responsibility of language teachers and the responses of language learners. She calls the 
two categories of failure "pragmalinguistic" and "sociopragmatic" failure. 
2.9.1. Pragmalinguistic Failure 
The first category of "pragmatic failures" proposed by Thomas (1983) is the so-called 
"pragmalinguistic failure." She refrains from using the term "pragmalinguistic error" 
because, to her, pragmatics is not strictly formalizable. The term error, therefore, does 
not seem applicable here. In other words, although grammar can be judged according to 
prescriptive rules, the nature of pragmatic or sociopragmatic patterns is such that it is 
not possible to say that "the pragmatic force of an utterance is wrong. All we can say is 
that it failed to achieve the speaker's goal" (cited in Wolfson, 1989: 16). In this case, 
the learners of a language translate an utterance from their first language into the target 
language. The learners, however, fail to get their meaning across because the 
communicative conventions behind the utterances used are different. This, as Thomas 
points out, is more a linguistic, hence pragmalinguistic, problem than a pragmatic one 
because: (1) it has little to do with speaker's perception of what constitutes appropriate 
behavior; and (2) it has a great deal to do with knowing how to phrase a request, for 
instance, so that it will be interpreted as a request rather than as an information question.