Deliberately Misinterpretation In Verbal Communication

In our daily communication, deliberately misinterpretation is hired usually. As a pragmatic strategy, deliberately misinterpretation is defined as a phenomenon of verbal understanding that is based on the correct understanding of speaker's utterance, and makes use of some special context or the uncertainty and ambiguity in speaker's utterance on purpose in order to make himself on the advantageous position or achieve a certain communicative aim, then misinterpret the significance of speaker's utterance.With Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Linguistics Adaptation Theory as the theoretical foundation, we focus our study mainly on these three aspects: the classification of deliberately misinterpretation, the mechanism of deliberately misinterpretation and the communicative function of deliberately misinterpretation. According to the significance of the speaker's utterance, we classify deliberately misinterpretation into two categories: explicit significance and implicit significance. And explicit significance is divided into two again, that is, utterance's meaning and indicative meaning. Then, on the basis of such a classification, we analyze the mechanism of deliberately misinterpretation. There are two reasons about the form mechanism of deliberately misinterpretation. One is the speaker's utterance, mainly manifested by the uncertainty and ambiguity of the utterance's significance. And the other is the listener's psychology. This refers to the special psychology that influences the listener's transferring of the context, mostly related to the listener's social status and his communicative demands, etc. Finally, the thesis displays that deliberately misinterpretation achieves the communicative function through adapting context.The study of deliberately misinterpretation is helpful for us to understand it profoundly and make people realize the importance of choosing and using pragmatic strategy in daily communication.