A Pragmatic Study Of Deliberate Misinterpretation In Verbal Communication

Deliberate misinterpretation (short for DMI) occurs when the hearer correctly understands the intended meaning which the speaker expresses via an utterance, the hearer subsequently produces an utterance which is in some way purposely employed to present the mismatch between the two possible meanings. By doing so, the hearer satisfies his/her own communicative needs. That is to say, deliberate misinterpretation is a specific pragmatic strategy in verbal communication.People always confuse deliberate misinterpretation with misunderstanding,and usually use deliberate misinterpretation to achieve special purposes. Misunderstanding is defined as a conversational phenomenon in language understanding in which the hearer does not understand the meaning of an utterance in a way by the speaker. Misunderstanding is a normal phenomenon occurs in verbal communication, the communicators'starting points aiming at achieving successful communication. Due to the vagueness or uncertainty of the language itself, the context, and different social and cultural background, etc., the hearer is led to misunderstanding by the speaker's words and thus causes failure of communication. Generally speaking, the most fundamental standard of distinguishing these two terms is the word"deliberate", or whether the hearer intends to misinterpretate.Generally speaking, when communicating with each other, the communicator will more or less do some conscious and unconscious adaptation to the language. Deliberate misinterpretation is just the strategy related to linguistic adaptation used by the communicator for specific purposes according to the communicative situation and inference. Therefore, besides the vagueness or uncertainty of language itself, context and inference, the operator's willingness is one of the most important prerequisites.At the beginning, this paper contrasts misunderstanding and deliberate misinterpretation, pointing out that these two terms represent two completely linguistic phenomena. Then, the prerequisites and pragmatic functions of deliberate misinterpretation will be discussed based on Reference Theory, Speech Act Theory and Linguistic Adaptation Theory. By analyzing related linguistic data such as law court debates, diplomatic occasions, interactions between the teacher and students, and dialogues from literary works, we seek to the functions of deliberate misinterpretation in verbal communication, and then classify them in a better way for the purpose of being a reference of effective communication.