A Prototype Study On Deliberate Misinterpretation

The present study tries to make a qualitative analysis of deliberate misinterpretation (DMI for short) with prototype theory. DMI is an interesting linguistic phenomenon that we often encounter in our daily verbal communication. According to Shen Zhiqi (2004: 41-42), a deliberate misinterpretation occurs when the second speaker (S2) correctly understands the first speaker's (S1) intended meaning, but subsequently produces an utterance which is in some way purposely employed to present the mismatch between his/her interpretation and S1's original interpretation. By so doing, S2 satisfies certain communicative needs of his/her own. It is considered as a useful communicative strategy which is often employed by people to satisfy their various communicative effects. The present study tries to approach this phenomenon under the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics, drawing heavily on the prototype theory. In terms of methodology, the current research makes a qualitative analysis of the data.The author concentrates mainly on two research questions, namely, the detailed process of DMI, and the various means linking contextualized prototypical meaning with nonprototypical meaning (how S2 deviates from S1 's intended meaning to his/her nonprototypical meaning). Through detailed examination of the process of DMI, we find that shared cognitive model and tendency to prototypical interpretation, necessary conditions for successful communication, constitute the cognitive bases of DMI in that S2 actualizes DMI based on the correct understanding of S1. Besides, we establish a cognitive analytical framework of the process of DMI and conduct a prototype study on this process. Our subsequent finding includes: the category of the interpretations of S1's utterance is made up of prototypical and nonprototypical interpretations. All the interpretations do not have equal status, but rather have different degrees of membership; the process of DMI is a process of violating of the principle of prototypical interpretation. The violation of the principle conflicts with S2's cognitive salience; S2's response is nonprototypical. It deviates from the stereotyped train of thought, which causes a sudden attention shift of S1. Consequently, S1 has to pay more efforts to identify S2's real meaning, which makes his/her cognitive process more complex; and both S1's contextualized prototypical meaning and S2's nonprototypical meaning are easy to be activated by them. Then, we proceed to study the issue of how S2 deviates from contextualized prototypical meaning to nonprototypical meaning. It turns out that S2 makes good use of the indeterminate and fuzzy nature of language to link those two meanings. Subsequently, we trace S2's deviation in terms of three cases: inadequate information, overinformative information and indeterminacy of linguistic expressions which are further divided into lexical ambiguity (homophones, polysemy and deixis), structural ambiguity, information focus ambiguity, scope of meaning, figurative language and conversational implicature. Despite the indeterminate and fuzzy nature of language, hearers can successfully infer speakers' intended meaning in most cases with the aid of context. Nevertheless, S2 in DMI, by making good use of this very indeterminate nature, deliberately gives an interpretation diverging from S1's intended meaning.Though this thesis is far from being perfect, it has general implications concerning the research of DMI and the related phenomena both in terms of theory and in terms of practice.