PRAGMATIC FAILURE IN A 2ND-LANGUAGE - GREETING RESPONSES IN ENGLISH BY POLISH STUDENTS

When the intended force of the speaker's utterance is not perceived or when it is misrepresented by the hearer, pragmatic failure (Thomas 19 83) occurs. Advanced Polish students of English fail pragmatically to perceive the formulaic nature of the greeting How are you (doing) (tod ay)? and interpret it as 'question for information' and/or they do not tolerate this formula as an acceptable or 'sincere' greeting. Other p roblems of students with responding to formulaic greetings in English involve an insufficient degree of automatization of their responses, a nd inappropriateness of their reactions at the morpho-syntactic level. The data for this study have been collected from English major studen ts in a native-like L2 situation during their 'Practical English Exam' .