A Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Misunderstanding

Misunderstanding is a common phenomenon in verbal communication. The author of the thesis endeavors to make an analysis of misunderstanding on the basis of principles of relevance theory and cognitive context from a cognitive pragmatic perspective. According to optimal relevance, ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator'abilities and preferences. However, we can not ensure that the hearer can make a correct judgment of the speaker's abilities and preferences. If there is an inadequate comprehension, then misunderstanding may take place. Misunderstanding in verbal communication is a complicated process, which involves elements of society, psychology and language. The study on any individual perspective can not fully illustrate the complex nature of misunderstanding; On the other hand, misunderstanding is a dynamic process and has divergence on any stage of verbal communication. Different kinds of misunderstanding occur in the stage of utterance expression, semantic inference or choice of context and some may get corrected in the process of communication. Consequently, people could not get a comprehensive overview of misunderstanding without considering the dynamic feature of it.Owing to the individual differences, especially the cognitive discrepancy and the uncontrollable factors in the natural environment, the author takes the method of qualitive analysis, i.e., first describes the object of the study, then collects data from the newspapers, TV series, daily conversations, and other scholars'research in a quantative way so as to find support for the research theories, and finally comes to a systematical understanding of the research object. Understanding is a process in which the stimulus and the relevance-theoretic context co-work to produce positive cognitive effects. If the hearer can choose the appropriate context from his encyclopedic knowledge, lexical knowledge and logical knowledge, misunderstanding will be avoided. Meanwhile, the author explains the notions of role consciousness and role relations, and further illustrates how the circumvention of misunderstanding is achieved by an overall analysis of the examples.The present study not only proves the powerful interpretability of relevance theory but also provides some implications to similar researches on other communicative strategies. It also makes some contributions on directing our daily communications and second language learning.