A Study Of Deliberate Misinterpretation As A Pragmatic Strategy In Verbal Communication From A Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Deliberate misinterpretation (DMI for short in the following parts), a branch of pragmatic study, is a specific pragmatic strategy adopted by language users. Specifically, DMI refers to the listeners misinterpret the significance of speaker's utterance on the basis of correct understanding by making use of some special context or the uncertainty and ambiguity in speaker's utterance so as to achieve a certain communicative aim.The present study is a qualitative research based on the data analysis. This thesis systematically analyzes DMI under the instruction of Verschueren's adaptation theory by collecting, analyzing and classifying the data.Firstly, a review of the previous literature on DMI and the development of adaptation theory in China is presented followed by their previous research limitations, and then the features of adaptation theory are introduced. Since adaptation theory is complete and widely applied, this thesis attempts to comprehensively analyze DMI by adopting adaptation theory as its theoretical framework.Inspired by Verschueren's adaptation theory, this thesis systematically analyzes DMI from four aspects (contextual adaptability, structural adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation process) and tries to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the triggering factors of the deliberate misinterpretation? (2) What is the realization ways of deliberate misinterpretation? (3) What are the pragmatic effects of deliberate misinterpretation in verbal communication?According to data analysis, two elements are needed to trigger deliberate misinterpretation:one is ambiguous components in utterer's utterance, the other is listener's intention to misinterpret the utterer. Moreover both of these two elements are inseparable. The analysis of the structural adaptability of DMI shows that the interpreter misinterpretates the utterer's utterrance phonetically, lexically or syntactically in order to achieve certain communicative purpose. In a word, DMI is a kind of highly conscious pragmatic strategy which is adapted on both contextual and syntactical structure dynamically. At the end of this thesis, the pragmatic functions were concluded by classifying the collected data. It is found that DMI has the function of making humor, protecting face, breaking ice, avoiding conflict, sidestepping and beating back. The study of this thesis also has some enlightenment. First, this thesis adopts adaptation theory as the theoretical framework whose wide application can give high instruction to the study of other language phenomenon. Second, the analysis of DMI in this thesis is intensive which can provide lots of information for further study on DMI. Finally, the analysis of the pragmatic functions of DMI can give people a guidance to choose strategy in verbal communication.