| Deliberate misinterpretation (DMI) is a common phenomenon in Chinese comic skits. Different from misunderstanding in which the hearer fails to supply the missing information in the speaker's utterances and can not understand the speaker's intended meaning correctly, DMI occurs when the hearer correctly understands the speaker but gives utterances diverging from the speaker's expectation deliberately in order to achieve certain communicative goals. As a popular art form, Chinese comic skit aims to create humor or sarcasm to entertain people by verbal and nonverbal means. DMI is one of the verbal means often utilized in Chinese comic skits.The present study is a pragmatic study on the means and causes of DMI in Chinese comic skits. Methodologically speaking, this study is a qualitative study. Relevance Theory(RT) is used as the general theoretical framework of the thesis. Data are collected from Chinese comic skits on TV and some of their scripts searched on the internet and then categorized according to the characteristics of the language.It was found that means of DMI are used at different levels such as pronunciation, lexicon, syntax, pragmatics and rhetoric, among which phonetic means and lexical means account for the two largest proportions. Causes of DMI include the hearer's intention, the characteristics of Chinese language and the vagueness in the speaker's utterance. The characteristics of Chinese language include: (1) some words are of the same pronunciation, but different characters or meanings or both; (2) some are made up of the same characters but these characters are in different order; (3) some are different in characters and meanings but similar in pronunciation; and (4) some words may mean differently in different contexts. The vagueness in the speaker's utterance is generally caused by polysemy, indeterminacy of deictic expression and the speaker's illocutionary force and information insufficiency in the speaker's utterances.
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