A Dynamic Study On Misunderstanding

Misunderstanding is a long-stangding phenomenon in speech communition. It exists in various forms of communication and communication activities in different language and culture backgrounds. Situations differ in misunderstanding: some don't cause serious consequences but others do. Such misunderstandings often cause negative effects which are unexpected, directly threatening the face of the communicator, affecting the ongoing communication activities, or even causing conflicts to interpersonal relation. The study on misunderstanding is of much theoratical importance and practical value as well.This dissertation tries to carry out overall and systematic research on the theory and application of misunderstanding. On the basis of the previous achievements on misunderstanding from different schools, I raise the objectives, research methods, train of thoughts and theoretical framework. My research objective includes all the real misunderstandings in speech communication activities, all the examples come from realistic situations. For research methods, I combine description and explanation, dynamic research and static research and contrastive analysis. My train of thought is: verbal communication is an interactive speech construction process with the joint participation of both sides of the communication. Communicators need to take objective context and subjective socio-psychological factors into consideration in order to negotiate, adjust and adapt meaning, and to reach correct understanding. Dynamic, interaction and multi-perspective can be seen from the beginning to the end of this dissertation. The framework of the dissertation consists of five aspects.1. On the nature of misunderstanding. Speech communication is an interactive process of verbal construction and verbal understanding with coming to understanding as its core concept. Misunderstanding, as a phenomenon, can be identified and treated from the cooperation and negotiation in the interactive communication process of both sides of the communication. And therefore, in a certain way, we can say that the elimination of misunderstanding is a kind of harmony in the dialogic process. The definition of misunderstanding consists of four elements: ascription, differentiating characteristics, the content or objective of misunderstanding and the finding or identification of misunderstanding. And we raise the concept of misunderstanding in this dissertation: misunderstanding is the reader/hearer's unintended mistakenly understanding or partial understanding of the discourse information or discourse intention of the speaker/writer. Based on the comparison between misunderstanding and non-understanding, divergent-understanding, deliberate-misinterpretation, misleading, communication failure and pragmatic failure, we clarified the extension of misunderstanding.2. On the classification of misunderstanding. On the basis of the summarization and evaluation of the existed research, I bring forward my criteria. They are discourse meaning criterion, comprehension result criterion, the degree of identification and disposition criterion. Discourse meaning criterion refers to the identification based on the information which is misunderstood, including linguistic meaning and speech meaning, with subclasses of conceptual meaning, referential meaning, connotative meaning, illocutionary force, conversational implicature, rhetoric implicature and so on. This criterion is easy to open out the nature of misunderstanding, so it's the most valuable one. Comprehension result criterion refers to the classification from the volume of information. It includes adding interpretation, decreased interpretation and transferred interpretation. This criterion focuses on the static result, failing to illuminate the actual forming of misunderstanding. The degree of identification and disposition criterion refers to the classification based on the follow up activities of the communicator, including instant identification and disposition, gradual identification and disposition, final identification but no disposition. These criteria disclose the nature of misunderstanding from different angles.3. On the causes of misunderstanding. We try to explore the deep causes of misunderstanding under the discourse elements on the coherent and dynamic analysis of the whole text. We try to find what verbal elements and non-verbal elements are involved in causing misunderstanding, how both sides of communication carry out instant feedback and adjustment based on the open and dynamic context, and how misunderstanding is eliminated, and so on. We find that it is not a certain unitary element that causes misunderstanding, but a comprehensive element that does, although ambiguity, vagueness and omitting are the main verbal elements which cause misunderstanding. The comprehensive elements include verbal means, motivation, speech roles, social elements, context information and psychological information. This mutual and dynamic train of thought, based on the construction and interpretation, can explain and illuminate misunderstanding more reasonably and more thoroughly.4. On the adjustment strategy of misunderstanding. On the basis of information rhetoric and controlling rhetoric research we discuss the information gap and adjustment, trying to reduce the possibility of misunderstanding and to guarantee the speech communication activity. We first discuss the controlling effect of utterance and the classification of utterance. Front feedback and back feedback, positive feedback and negative feedback are differentiated based on the order and function of feedback. We find that the mechanism of utterance control lies in negative feedback. And then we discuss the specific strategies of avoiding and eliminating misunderstanding from different levels of pronunciation, vocabulary and sentence patterns. I conclude that all the controlling and adjusting of pronunciation, vocabulary and sentence patterns can come down to pragmatics and rhetoric. That is to say, in order to eliminate misunderstanding and information gap, both sides of communication need to adjust their language through constant feedback in the conversation construction and interpretation to accommodate both sides and to reach mutual understanding.5. On the application of misunderstanding research. Besides theoretical analysis on misunderstanding, this dissertation also tries to explore its application in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages. We find that international students often misunderstand transferred meaning, metaphorical meaning, special cultural meaning and fables, which affects their fast reading, formation of sense of Chinese and grasp of core meaning of information. My research can provide guidance and help in this area. My research on misunderstanding can also help in translation. Literal translation exists in the process of translation because of different psychological mechanism in conceptualization and different means of language, which causes misinterpretation and affects the nature of translation. This research can also help to lessen the difficulty in cross-cultural understanding and communication.The study on misunderstanding has not only to take account of the restriction that the situation and social elements have on the speaker when constructing discourse, but also give consideration of the cognitive psychology mechanism of the listener when interpreting the discourse. It's quite difficult to include all the distinctive features of misunderstanding describing from one single aspect. This study goes through an overall and systematic exploration and interpretation on misunderstanding based on the theories of pragmatics, modern rhetoric, disourse linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics cognitive linguistics and related subjects.