Pragmatic Analysis Of Deliberate Misinterpretation In Verbal Communication

According to Shen Zhiqi (2004), deliberate misinterpretation occurs when the hearer correctly understands the intended meaning which the speaker expresses via an utterance (x1), the hearer subsequently produces an utterance (x2) which is in some way purposely employed to present the mismatch between the meaning of x1 and x2. By doing so, the hearer satisfies certain communicative needs of his own. So deliberate misinterpretation is a pragmatic strategy adopted by the hearer to fulfill his communicative goals. It is quite different from misunderstanding which is the accidental transmission of information.With Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory, Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Face and Politeness Principle as the general conceptual framework, based on the research results of misunderstanding and deliberate misinterpretation of scholars at home and abroad, this thesis focuses on two aspects: the classification and the generative mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation.Deliberate misinterpretation in this thesis is classified into two broad categories in light of the distinction between explicature and implicature in Relevance Theory: deliberate misinterpretation of explicit meaning (further categorized into deliberate misinterpretation of propositions and deliberate misinterpretation of deictic expression) and deliberate misinterpretation of implicit meaning (further categorized into deliberate misinterpretation of indirect speech acts and deliberate misinterpretation of conversational implicature).The focus of the project is the study on the generative mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation which is concerned with the discussion of the roots of deliberate misinterpretation and the interaction of these causes. Successful deliberate misinterpretation involves a prerequisite—mutuality of the two speakers, and two roots: one is the speaker's utterance; the other is the hearer's psychological state or mentality. The speaker's utterance is characterized by the indeterminacy of the utterance meaning or the fuzziness of the language. The hearer's mentality related to the hearer's social status and communication needs which includes self-adaptation mentality, self-protection mentality, special-communicative-effect-achieving mentality and relationship-harmony mentality. They are all indispensable for the generation of deliberate misinterpretation.The research results of the present study is the classification and generative mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation, which is not only helpful to deepen our understanding of this very language phenomenon and to human verbal communication, but is also valuable to pragmatic studies.