A Tentative Study Of The Causes Of Misunderstanding From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Misunderstanding, as a pervasive phenomenon, has been receiving more and more attention from linguists, sociologists, psychologists, researchers of communication. These scholars are all concerned with the sources of misunderstanding. But little research has touched upon the phenomenon from communication process so far. However, only through analysis of misunderstanding in communication process can we reveal the reason behind the phenomenon. The thesis attempts to make some tentative explorations of the triggers and generative mechanism from a new perspective.With Relevance Theory as its framework, the thesis probes into the conversational phenomenon of misunderstanding in Chinese verbal communication from the pragmatic perspective. As an inferential theory of communication, Relevance Theory aims to explain how the audience infers the communicator's intended meaning. The basic point of Relevance Theory is that communication is an ostensive-inferential process. Communication involves both ostension and inference. From the speaker's perspective, communication is an ostension process. Through ostensive behavior, the speaker makes manifest two intentions, one is informative intention, the other is communicative intention. From the hearer's perspective, communication is an inference process. The hearer's task is to infer the speaker's communicative intention on the basis of the combination of the utterances provided by the speaker and his own contextual assumptions. Ostension is the basis of inference. Due to various reasons, though the speaker strives for optimal relevance, ostension problems still exist in daily life. For example, his utterances may present the following problems, i.e, lack of ostension, overinformativeness or underinformativeness, etc. All these problems may lead to misunderstanding. Meanwhile, inference also has indeterminacies on the part of the hearer. First of all, unlike logical inference, pragmatic inference is non-demonstrative, which has no fixed premises in inference process, so pragmatic inference is fallible and indeterminate by nature. Secondly, the hearer is not passive in comprehension. Communication is a cognition process, so the hearer's cognitive psychology also tends to participate in communication. According to Zong Shihai (2000), there are two kinds of cognitive psychology: stereotypical mentality and closeness option mentality. All these two kinds of mentalities also increase the possibilities of being misunderstood. So the thesis assumes that it is just the interaction between the ostension problems and inference indeterminacies that brings about misunderstanding.Relevance Theory proposes two principles of relevance: The cognitive principle of relevance (Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance) and The communicative principle of relevance (Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance). Since the mind tends to allocate the most relevant information, if the speaker wants to be understood, he should produce a stimulus which is at least relevant enough to the hearer to be worth processing. Sperber and Wilson further propose the presumption of optimal relevance. They point out that the ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences. However, nothing could guarantee the hearer's accurate knowledge of the speaker's abilities and preferences. When the hearer does not know well enough about the speaker, misunderstanding might happen.Without the help of context, it is impossible for the hearer to infer the speaker's intention. Contrary to traditional views, context in Relevance Theory is a subset of the hearer's assumptions of the world. The context is not given once and for all, and it is rebuilt for each new utterance. The interpretation process is to search for optimal relevance and then construct a context to process the new information. The speaker always conveys a set of contextual assumptions, the hearer has to select the right context intended by the speaker among all the contextual assumptions. However, the hearer's long-term memory, short-term memory and perception all influence the selection of the intended context. If the hearer uses a context which is not intended by the speaker, context conflicts will occur. Thus misunderstanding arises. The study will not only deepen our understanding of misunderstanding, but also prove to be of enormous value to pragmatics. Though it is based on Chinese data, the analysis of triggers of misunderstanding arising in communication process and the generative mechanism of misunderstanding will certainly shed light on misunderstanding existent in other languages and in intercultural communication.