earticle

영어

This study aims to find out the relationship between general pragmatic competence and linguistic proficiency by comparing pragmatic failures of Korean and English emails sent by Korean university students to faculty regarding their final grade in the end of a semester. The data was collected from 120 Korean university students who produced 40 Korean emails and 80 English emails, and the English emails were again divided into two groups depending on the participants' linguistic proficiency. Each email was analyzed for pragmatic appropriateness and linguistic formality that each part of a formal email requires. Results showed that significantly similar patterns of pragmatic failure were found among three groups, including omission of salutation and sign-off, inappropriate forms of address, aggressive directness of request act and supportive move. These findings imply that pragmatic failure can be primarily caused by lack of general pragmatic competence such as universal knowledge of politeness or acknowledgement of imposition on the addressee