A Cross-cultural Pragmatic Comparative Study Of DMI In Chinese And American Sitcoms

Deliberate Misinterpretation, or DMI for short, is a particular linguistic phenomenon, which attractsmany foreign and domestic researchers’ attention. They have done some qualitative researches frompragmatic, rhetorical and logical perspectives. However, as a culture-loaded phenomenon, it lackscross-cultural contrastive qualitative and quantitative research. The lack of such contrastive research makesthe present research meaningful.The present thesis, obtaining linguistic corpus from both American sitcoms “The Big Bang Theory”(“TBBT”) and Chinese sitcom “ipartment”, tries to probe into the generative and operative mechanism ofDMI for the purpose of finding the cultural differences of these two mechanisms among these sitcoms.Four important pragmatic theories (Linguistic Adaptation Theory, Relevance Theory, Politeness Principleand Face Theory) and a model of generative and operative mechanism of DMI from Shen Zhiqi (2004)form the theoretical basis of the present research. As a pragmatic strategy, DMI achieves differentpragmatic functions which are also the other concern of the present thesis.Both qualitative and quantitative researches are employed to solve the research questions. Firstly, allthe DMI instances from both sitcoms are selected under the definition given by Shen Zhiqi. In all,85instances have been found in “ipartment”, and91instances in “TBBT”.15and21instances are deletedrandomly though random number table for subjectivity. Thus, altogether140cases (70from each) havebeen selected, which are in turn further divided into different categories according to the generative andoperative mechanism. The occurrence frequency has been counted and analyzed by the author.Results show that DMI in these two sitcoms mostly appeared as explicit meaning, with the “TBBT”(81.41%) a little higher than that of “ipartment”(78.56%). While on the perspective of implicit meaning,“ipartment” accounts for more DMI items than that of “TBBT”. The possible reason is Chinese culturebelongs to implicit culture and high-context culture, while American culture belongs to explicit culture andlow-context culture. American people values logic and analysis, their thought pattern is analytical, whileChinese people values intuition and impression, theirs is holistic thought pattern. As to research questiontwo, the operative mechanism of these two sitcoms has the same pattern, but they differ in their frequencyof subcategories of operative mechanism. Data shows that “being literal” and “shifting the point” are twomost frequently used mechanisms that both American and Chinese sitcoms operate DMI. And the top threefrequently used operative mechanisms in “TBBT” are:“being overliteral”,“shifting the point” and “telling a truism”, on the contrary, the top three in “ipartment” appeared to be:“distortion”,“shifting the point”and “being overliteral”. These differences may result from the paradigm of Chinese thinking pattern whichis whole intuition, while American pattern values logic and analysis. Six pragmatic functions put forwardby Shen Zhiqi can be found in these two sitcoms.“Humor” is the most frequently used pragmatic functionin both American and Chinese sitcoms due to the characteristic of sitcoms. Nearly all DMI examplescontain the humor effect. Ranking after “humor”,“maintain harmonious relationship” and “face-saving”also shows a high frequency. The pragmatic functions of DMI in these two sitcoms have no obviousdifference, and what’s more, two or more pragmatic functions can be seen in one example, becausepragmatic functions of DMI are affected by “subject matter” and “personal relationship”.From the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatic, by analyzing the generative, operative mechanismand pragmatic functions of DMI, the author makes a deeper understanding to this special linguisticphenomenon as well as revealing the differences between American and Chinese culture.