【正文】 ome progress. Hence, we are apt to call people “Laozhang”, “Laoshifu”, and “Dajie” to show our respect to those people. The word “old” was greatly appreciated and widely accepted in china. But in western countries, the word “old” is a taboo for them。 there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture. This means personality, how people express themselves (including shows of emotion), the way they think, how they move, how problems are solved, how their cities are planned and laid out, how transportation systems function and are organized, as well as how economic and government systems are put together and function.”（Edward T. Hall, 40） Definition of Crosscultural CommunicationAs is known to all, the crosscultural munication has bee increasingly important for humans. The need for crosscultural munication is as old as humankind. We’ve discussed the definition of culture. Now, it is necessary to know something about the concepts of crosscultural munication, which is the fist step to have a deeper understanding of social pragmatic failures. The crosscultural munication (also frequently referred to as intercultural munication, which is also used in a different sense, though) is a field of study that looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds municate, in similar or different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to municate across cultures. Relationship Between Language and CultureLanguage and culture are closely connected with each other and it is impossible to separate out use of language from our culture. As is known to all, language has been acting as a very important role in the process of human historical development. Just as the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson’s simple sentence “l(fā)anguage is the archives of history”. His declaration makes us realize that one of the major characteristics identifying us as humans is our ability to use languageto make sounds and marks serve as substitutes for things and feelings. In the past, people usually regarded language as simply a neutral medium, which did not influence the way people experienced the world. It was merely a vehicle by which ideas were presented, rather than a shaper of very substance of those ideas. This view had been denied by later linguists. The new point is that language and culture are closely linked with each other. Language is the reflection of culture and culture is a reflection of language.Culture influences language by way of symbols and rules as well as our perceptions of the universe. Each time we select words, form sentences, and send a message, either oral or written, we also make cultural choices. If we select language without being aware of the cultural implications, we may be at best not municate well and at worst send the wrong message. At the same time, language is the most symbolic reflection of culture. Members of the culture have created the language to carry out all their cultural practices, to identify and organize all their cultural products, and to name the underlying cultural perspectives in all the various munities that prise their culture. The words of language, its expressions, structures, sounds and scripts reflect the culture, just as the cultural products and practices reflect the language. Language, therefore, is perceived as window to the culture. In a word, it is impossible to separate language and culture apart.Hence, in our process of intercultural munication not only the linguistic usage of certain language should be emphasized but also how to use the language in the right time as well as the right occasion. If we failed to do this, munication barriers must occur, and social pragmatic failures are the most typical ones among those munication barriers. Crosscultural Social Pragmatic FailuresThe term “pragmatic failure” was first used by British linguist Jenny Thomas in her paper “crosscultural pragmatic failure” (1983), published in applied linguistics. It is to define the inability to understand what is meant by what said. Thomas divided pragmatic failure into two types, pragmaticlinguistic failure and socialpragmatic failure. Pragmaticlinguistic failure refers to the inability in interpreting the linguistic meaning by mistaken beliefs about pragmatic force of utterance. And social pragmatic failure refers to the expressive inappropriateness resulted from the misunderstanding or the ignorance of social or cultural diffe