Verbal Misunderstanding In A Cognitive-Pragmatic Perspective

Possibly due to its detrimental effects on human communication and its high frequency in it, verbal misunderstanding has since a long time ago been observed and explored by thinking men and common folks alike. While former studies of this subject were mostly conducted to meet interests in philosophy or intercultural communication, in recent years, a cognitive pragmatic perspective has been adopted. Studies in this trend have emerged both in and outside China. Noticeable among them are those done by the Spaniard, Francisco Ramos Yus and the Chinese, Zong Shihai. Guided by Relevance Theory, these authors probed into the definition, classification and generative mechanism of verbal misunderstanding. Their purpose was to offer a unified framework to explain and describe verbal misunderstanding in a principled way.The purpose is shared by the author. In this research, the author will also offer a framework of his own to describe and explain verbal misunderstanding as it occurs in everyday life. Former studies are not satisfactory for two reasons. One practical, the other theoretical. First, concerning the definition, classification and causes of misunderstanding, many claims remain tentative, abstract, hypothetical and controversial. Second, by sticking to RT arguments, they failed to take into account other aspects of verbal communication. In light of this, in order to achieve an integrated perspective of its own, besides RT, the thesis will draw insights from cognitive theory to help analyze and explain misunderstanding cases.The thesis proposes the following hypotheses:(1)A11 misunderstanding cases arise because the receiver of an utterance fails to invoke the cognitive context or mental schema (a set of mental representations) intended by the utterer to process the utterance.(2) Daily verbal misunderstanding can be neatly classified according to what goes wrong at the different level of context in the process of contextualization.(3) Real time utterance comprehension depends on knowledge derived from past experience. Being so, it is inherently subjective and fallible.The study follows the following procedure: First, the author tries to find out problems with former studies of the same subject. Second, He puts forward hypothesesof his own to resolve the problems he discovered after consulting relevant literature. Third, he tests his hypotheses through empirical investigation. Fourth, he reviews his test results and concludes the study.In literature review section, the thesis summarizes insights and findings from former researches into relevant subjects and occasionally comment on them to make clear its own theoretical position. Its focuses are insights into two areas: First, models for the mechanism of verbal communications, as they include conceptions of how utterance interpretation is achieved. Basically, the thesis introduces two theoretical models on the mechanism of verbal communication: one, RT's inferential model of utterance interpretation;the other, cognitive theory on how past experience and knowledge affect real time utterance comprehension. Second, views on the definition, classification and causes of misunderstanding.The empirical investigation is based on the author's own corpus. The corpus consists of 70 plus actual misunderstanding cases most of which he collected from his personal communication history from August 2005 to March 2006. They are written records of pieces of his verbal exchange with his classmates, friends or acquaintances over telephone, in email or within hailing distance. The interlocutors are familiar with each other and they communicate in their native language. The author transcribes them in the format of diary together with his own analysis of their generative processes. For illustrative purpose, the author translated some of them into English.The author's investigation starts with the definition of verbal misunderstanding. Based on the assumption that all verbal misunderstanding stems from the inferential nature of verbal communication, and all the inference involved in utterance interpretation is done to determine a cognitive context for the utterance where the utterance can make sense, the author gives a definition of verbal misunderstanding like this: Verbal misunderstanding refers to the kind of cognitive pragmatic phenomena where a hearer of an utterance contextualizes the utterance in a way that is not intended by the addressor.Following this line of thought, the thesis classifies verbal misunderstanding according to the very practical consideration of what goes wrong in the process of contextualization of an utterance. The thesis refers to Gumperz, Dascal, and Wilson and concludes five categories of misunderstanding, corresponding to the five aspects of the inferential process of utterance comprehension. These are the points that are ultimatelydetermined by human judgment, thus they are sources of verbal misunderstanding.Based on this classification, the author examines examples from his corpus to test its efficiency as a classification system. The thesis reviews these cases and their related backgrounds and try to find out how they happened by reconstructing the mental states of the interlocutors when they happened.Based on investigation results, and in reference to cognitive theory, the thesis reflects on the generative mechanism of verbal misunderstanding. The author reaches the following conclusions: (1) Verbal misunderstanding is ultimately a contextualization problem and linguistically encoded information generally falls short of the speaker meaning. We should not blame solely the indeterminacy of language for verbal misunderstanding. (2) Misunderstandings are rarely exclusively the result of flawed or incompetent performances of actors, either. (3) Understanding depends crucially on previous knowledge and past experience affects real time utterance comprehension process. In short, the point is that verbal misunderstanding stems from the inferential nature of verbal communication and our inference about an utterance's meaning draws heavily from our life experience and our conception of the world. Thus it is essentially subjective and fallible.