【正文】 different cultures have totally different taboos.Case (6), A Chinese student Xiaozhang saw an old American lady carry a large bag, and said to her, “Can I help you, old lady?” Then the old lady looked at him angrily, said nothing and went away.Analyses: In Chinese traditional culture, old people had been given great respect by younger generations. Because we maintain that old people usually have a rich experience and can always give us many constructive suggests when we want to achieve some 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。湖南商學院北津學院學年論文The Social Pragmatic Failures in Crosscultural Communication1 IntroductionRecently, there is a wave of globalization due to factors including mass access to internet, globalization of industry, and expansion of educational exchanges and so on. New technologies, growth of the world’s population, and shift in the global economic area have all contributed to the increase in crosscultural munication. Therefore, crosscultural munication has bee indispensable today. Language used by human beings is the most basic tool for munication, which plays a crucial role in the process of human historical development. We use words to persuade, to exchange ideas, to express views, to seek information, and to express feelings. We made cultural choices when we are using human language to municate with other people. Culture shapes our ideas and plays a crucial role on influencing our way of using language. At the same time, language can also be considered as a window to the culture. They are closely connected with each other and can never be separated. Therefore, we should not only learn linguistic skills well but also know much knowledge about foreign cultures if we want to conquer a foreign language and bee an effective municator. But the fact is that many people didn’t pay much attention to the cultural backgrounds and used words to municate with others in an inappropriate way and inappropriate occasion. In this way, the social pragmatic failures often occur during the crosscultural munication.Because of the fierce conflicts between the popularity of crosscultural munication and the frequently happening munication barriers, the factors affecting munication are drawing much more attention from the researchers. In the past two decades, there has been an increasing interest in the study of pragmatic failures in crosscultural munication. Crosscultural social pragmatic failures have been an important area of pragmatics and crosscultural munication studies. The social pragmatic failures are mainly caused by cultural differences and lack of awareness about this issue. Hence, we have to figure out some solutions to deal with it, such as strengthen cultural awareness, avoid negative stereotype and cultivate crosscultural munication petence. Only in this way can we achieve a satisfied result from the intercultural munication2 Theoretical BackgroundsIn order to have a prehensive understanding of social pragmatic failures during the intercultural munication, we’d better learn some background information about culture. The knowledge about definition of culture, crosscultural munication, and the social pragmatic failures and the relationship between language and culture are ought to be familiar to us.. Definition of CultureThe word “culture” is a large and evasive concept, very plex and difficult to define. There are hundreds of definitions for culture. Here I present only two concepts which I favor most. The one is “A culture is a collection of beliefs, habits, living patterns, and behaviors which are held more or less in mon by people who occupy particular geographic areas.” (, 40) The other is explained in a more detailed way: “culture is man’s medium。 they usually avoid this word by using some euphemisms. For instance, people are more likely to use the term “senior citizen” rather than “old people” when they refer to someone with an old age. So we should try to avoid those cultural taboos and respect other’s cultures. In this way, we would keep our munication going smoothly and some embarrassing situations can be avoided effectively.4 The Causes of Social Pragmatic Failures There are many reasons of the social pragmatic failures. This