Pragmatic Failures and Misunderstandings in Selected Extracts from Testing the Echo

Abstract

The paper attempts to pragmatics and culture. In the selected extracts from Testing the Echo, a contemporary realistic play with cultural and political dimensions. It is written to be performed with dialogue and stage directions. The aim is to show how interactions between characters with differing linguistic and cultural backgrounds lead to misunderstandings. The purpose is to elaborate the communicative situations and struggles that non-native speakers experience due to a lack of shared knowledge or common ground in the context of the communication process. While analyzing these extracts, it was obvious that the failures of communication lead to serious cultural   conflicts. The analysis depends on intercultural aspects of pragmatics.

 Intercultures are ad hoc creations, in other words, ‘’culture constructed in cultural content’’ as referred to by Kool and ten Thiji (1994;69). In standard pragmatics, this cultural difference between communicators is often referred to as a 'collision of cultures.' However, intercultural pragmatics challenges this perspective, framing intercultural communication instead as a normal process of 'success and failure. Blommaert, (1993;8) argues that it is a mistake to think of intercultural communication as just a clash of different cultures or gaps between them. Instead, it is about understanding how communication happens in specific contexts. This is what intercultural pragmatics focuses on.