Deliberate Misinterpretation Of The Mechanisms Of Cognitive Research

Deliberate misinterpretation (DMI), also called intentional misunderstanding, is a communicative strategy adopted by language users to fulfill some purposes in verbal communication. Deliberate misinterpretation is a language phenomenon of common occurrence, however, it has not attracted widespread attention of scholars in the linguistic field. Overall, the systematic studies of this phenomenon are bits and pieces. Most of previous studies mainly approach deliberate misinterpretation from the logic, rhetoric or pragmatic perspective, focusing on its triggers, means and pragmatic functions. Then questions arise: Why do people choose deliberate misinterpretation strategically? What is the cognitive mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation? These questions are just what the author attempts to answer in this thesis.With Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) and Inhibition & Salience as the general theoretical framework, we concentrate on the mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation from the cognitive perspective. The analysis of deliberate misinterpretation is conducted from the following two aspects: the psychological motivations underlying deliberate misinterpretation and the cognitive mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation. We hold that the hearer's deliberate misinterpretation of the speaker's utterance is motivated by his communicative intention. As is known to all, communication is a purposeful activity. Both sides in communication tend to direct their conversation in their own favor consciously or unconsciously. It is under the motivation of the hearer's psychological intention that he chooses deliberate misinterpretation as an effective strategy.The cognitive mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation involves two phases: the hearer's proper understanding and the hearer's misinterpretation of the speaker's utterance. In the first stage, the hearer could activate an ICM expected by the speaker based on his previous experiences and the immediate context in which the communication takes place, thus arriving at a proper understanding. However, under the influence of his psychological intention, the hearer will not highlight all of the information he received but sift through all the information received and decide on which should be inhibited and which salient although sometimes such a choice is made unconsciously. In the second stage where deliberate misinterpretation is produced, the hearer will experience the following cognitive operations: (1)the hearer inhibits the speaker's original meaning and defines the specific linguistic expressions in speaker's utterance in another reference-ICM or event-ICM, thus making a different meaning prominent; (2)the hearer and the speaker refer to, or single out different entities in the same reference-ICM or retrieve different instantiations in triggering the same event-ICM although they share the same reference-ICM or event-ICM; (3)the hearer may employ metaphoric or metonymic reasoning while the speaker not; or the hearer does not make metaphoric or metonymic inferences while the speaker does, so the indeterminacy of cognitive reasoning makes different entities salient in their minds.This thesis is a tentative analysis of the mechanism underlying deliberate misinterpretation from the cognitive perspective. We hope that it can facilitate the research on deliberate misinterpretation and shed some light on future studies pertinent to this language phenomenon.