A Study Of Verbal Misunderstanding From A Schema Theory Perspective

Misunderstanding occurs frequently in verbal communication. Scholars did many researches to probe into its definition, classification and causes from different theoretical perspectives.In cross-cultural linguistics, Thomas raises the concept"pragmatic failure"in her book Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure. She points out that there are two levels of misunderstanding. The first-level misunderstanding refers to the hearer's failing to understand the proposition the speaker expresses. The second-level misunderstanding refers to the hearer's failing to understand the pragmatic meaning intended by the speaker. According to Thomas, intracultural communication is the same as cross-cultural communication. Thus, cross-cultural communication includes not only encounters among people with different cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds, but also encounters associated with such variables as gender, class, race, and age. Likewise, many other scholars such as Gumperz (1978),Tannen (1990), Coates (1993) and Dascal (1985) examined the relations between misunderstanding and personal or cultural factors.The relevance theory has been intensely studied in China over the recent 10 years. It offers a theoretical tool for misunderstanding analysis. It points out that communication is in nature an ostensive-referential process which is governed by the principal of relevance. RT reveals that misunderstanding is unavoidable in human verbal interpretation due to its inferential nature.The Spanish scholar Francisco Yus Ramos published three papers on the problem of misunderstanding in the frame of RT. He defines misunderstanding as the addressee's inability to select one interpretation, among all the possible interpretations that a stimulus can have in a context, which is precisely the interpretation that the addresser intends to communicate. In the first paper "Misunderstanding and Explicit/Implicit Communication", Yus puts forward with a new viewpoint that a speaker's utterance is not a continuum from explicit to implicit but two sub-continuums, explicit sub-continuum and implicit sub-continuum. These two continuums have continuous penetrability and frequent transfers, which cast threats on hearers' optimal relevance to utterances. Therefore, misunderstanding comes into being.Likewise, in the framework of relevance theory, Chinese scholar Zong Shihai raises two causes for misunderstanding: the speaker's utterance and the mentality of the hearer. These two causes are indispensable for the occurrence of misunderstanding with the speaker's utterance bearing the chance of being misunderstood or misinterpreted; and the hearer's mentality bringing about the actual occurrence of misunderstanding. He defines misunderstanding as follows: Verbal misunderstanding is "a conversational phenomenon in language understanding in which the hearer does not understand the meaning of an utterance in the way intended by the speaker."However, there are two major deficiencies in previous studies: one, researches on the definition, classification, causes of misunderstanding remain tentative, abstract, hypothetical and controversial. Two, theoretical approaches adopted by previous researches cannot reveal the cognitive cause of misunderstanding from a deeper perspective. Based on the above considerations, this thesis tries to describe and interpret daily misunderstanding cases in the frame of schema theory and make empirical investigations concerning the definition, classification, cognitive causes of misunderstanding phenomenon.Schema theory is one of the most important conceptual frameworks for understanding text and utterance. It is basically a theory of how knowledge is mentally represented in the mind and used. Memory takes the form of schemas, which provide a mental representation or framework for understanding, remembering and applying information. Through activation and modification of schema, it selects, predicts, and enriches necessary information to interpret the utterance.Misunderstanding is in nature an understanding process. Both proper understanding and misunderstanding occur on the same physiological and cognitive basis and operate on the same object of language input. Both follow the same metal procedure of utterance comprehension. Misunderstanding is not caused by the hearer's language inability or deficiency. It is triggered by schema variation which is due to personal experience differentiation. Thus, this thesis defines misunderstanding as follows: Misunderstanding is an understanding process in which the hearer activates a cognitive schema that is not intended by the speaker to understand the utterance.In order to display more vividly the process of misunderstanding, a cognitive model of discourse comprehension and production is presented in this thesis. It shows that schemas function in both cognitive and linguistic levels. According to the failure of schema function in both cognitive and linguistic levels when interpreting an utterance, the author classifies verbal misunderstanding into six types with each type illustrated by concrete misunderstanding cases. In the last section, this thesis reviews of researches on causes of misunderstanding and raises it own opinion: verbal misunderstanding is ultimately an understanding phenomenon. Linguistically encoded information generally falls short of the speaker's meaning. Understanding depends crucially on previous knowledge and past experience affects real time utterance comprehension process. In short, the inter-subjectivity in the inferential understanding process makes misunderstanding inevitable.