Pragmatic Analysis of Progress Reports through a case study of communications between local and head offices of a UK university

摘要

Progress reports are usual the important means of communication between China office and its head office at a UK university, but sometimes do not efficiently serve their purposes. This paper applied ethnographic research and pragmatic analysis to examine the insufficient issues of progress reports collected as primary data in the case study. The causes to the gaps between the expected and actual perlocutionary effects were discussed from the angle of the cultural differences in the pragmatic information with the assumption that all four validity claims raised in the speech act were true and truthful. In addition, the elements in pragmatic information that need to be considered for successfully fulfilling a certain type of illocutionary act were abstracted from the findings using grounded theory research. The analysis of each issue was organized by using a self-defined template. Although it provided only a simplified view of analyzing communication issues, the approach was verified effective in the practice. The communication efficiency is also affected by other factors such as communication context, the notion differences of illocutionary acts, and the acceptance of validity claims. Therefore, in future studies, the role of pragmatic information in forming notions of illocutionary acts and the influences of the context of communication and validity claims on both illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects will be analyzed in order to develop relatively comprehensive solutions to the inefficiency of progress reports.