A Cognitive Approach To Deliberate Misinterpretation

Deliberate misinterpretation (DMI) is a special language phenomenon. Itoccurs when the hearer correctly understands the speaker but gives utterancesdiverging from the speaker’s expectation deliberately in order to achieve certaincommunicative goals. It is often strategically utilized in Chinese comic skits toachieve the goal of entertainment.Traditionally, DMI is mainly studied from logic, rhetorical and pragmaticviews to discuss its triggers and functions. With the development of cognitivelinguistics, many scholars approach to DMI from cognitive perspective, but few havetouched upon DMI in Chinese comic skits. Therefore, this thesis aims to reveal theproduction mechanism of DMI in Chinese comic skits from the viewpoint ofcognitive linguistics.The thesis analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Autonomy-DependencyFramework and ICM Theory respectively, and points out that the former lacks thecategorization interpretation of utterances while the latter lacks the process ofinference in interpreting DMI, based on which an integrated model ADC isestablished to interpret DMI in Chinese comic skits. This thesis believes that theproduction mechanism of DMI is a process of derivation from autonomous elementsto dependent elements by means of ICM conversion on the basis of similarity andproximity principle. The whole process is substantially equivalent to the derivationfrom autonomous elements to dependent elements.