An Analysis Of The Contextual Causes Of Misunderstanding From The Adaptation-Relevance Perspective

MIS is one of the language phenomena in human beings’daily life. The process of verbal communication is actually a process of conveying information. In the process of conveying information, because the information transmitters are constrained or influenced by all kinds of factors, it may lead to a mismatch between the information conveyed and perceived. In this condition, MIS may occur. In recent years, more and more scholars have paid their attentions to the research of MIS, which makes it an important topic in the field of pragmatics.Therefore, this paper analyzes the contextual causes of MIS from the adaptation-relevance perspective. Specifically, this paper tries to solve the following three questions:1) Is the Adaptation-Relevance Theory capable of shedding light on the occurrence of MIS?2) How do the contextual factors lead to the occurrence of MIS?3) Do the contextual factors lead to the occurrence of MIS in the same way?The Adaptation-Relevance Theory points out that both speaker and hearer should be considered in the process of verbal communication which meets the point that the speaker and the hearer should be both responsible for the occurrence of MIS. Many scholars have used the Relevance Theory (RT) and the Adaptation Theory (AT) to study MIS. The demerits of RT and AT, however, are obvious, RT just emphasizing the hearer’s inference and AT just focusing on the speaker’s production. The Adaptation-Relevance Theory, as the integration of Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory, has overcome their demerits to some degree. Therefore, theoretically, the Adaptation-Relevance Theory is capable of giving a satisfactory solution to the occurrence of MIS.The Adaptation-Relevance Theory divides the context into three types:the linguistic context, the situational context and the background context. In the linguistic context, the author analyzed the data from four perspectives, the sound, the word, the syntactic, and the discourse level to find out how these factors lead to the occurrence of MIS; in the situational context, the author analyzed the data from the two perspectives, the temporal and the spatial reference, to find out how these factors lead to the occurrence of MIS; in the background context, the author analyzed the data from the perspective of encyclopedic information, the social world and the mental world to find out how these factors lead to the occurrence of MIS. Through the analysis of data, the author draws these tentative conclusions:1) For MIS caused by factors of linguistic context (the sound, the word, the syntax, the discourse) and the situational context (the temporal reference and the spatial reference), the reason of its occurrence is that the utterance of speaker causes confusion on hearer’s formation of contextual assumption. Therefore, in the hearer’s process of adaptation-relevance, he or she has to use his or her own information to extent, adjust, or adapt his or her contextual assumption to adapt to the speaker’s utterance and he or she just chooses the information that would cost his or her least effort. If the information the hearer chosen to form his or her contextual assumption is not concord to that of the speaker, there comes the MIS.2) For MIS caused by the factors of background context (the encyclopedic information, the social world, and the mental world), its reason of occurrence can be divided into three types:(1) MIS is caused by the encyclopedic information (common sense). The reason of its occurrence is that the hearer regards the thing expressed by the speaker as mutual information. Therefore, he or she immediately uses it to extent, adjust or adapt his or her contextual assumption to the speaker’s information. However, from the speaker’s point of view, the meaning he or she expressed is not common sense. In this condition, the contexts used by the speaker and the hearer are different, which leads to the occurrence of MIS;(2) MIS is caused by the social world (culture). The reason of its occurrence is that the speaker and the hearer have different cultural backgrounds and are not familiar with each other’s cultural backgrounds so that they map different meaning on the same information. Such different use of context can also lead to the occurrence of MIS finally;(3) MIS is caused by the mental world (the mentality of self-evaluation, self-expectation, and self-defense). The reason of its occurrence is that the speaker’s utterance and the state of the hearer’s emotion, alert, profits etc make a certain social mentality more manifest in the hearer’s mind, which however is not the speaker’s intended meaning. Such different salience of mentality by the speaker and the hearer can also account for the occurrence of MIS.The study of MIS can not only deepen our understanding of MIS, but also help us understand the contextual causes of MIS. It can contribute to the further research of the nature of MIS to some degree and provide some references for the development of pragmatic theory.