A Study Of Deliberate Misinterpretation In English Verbal Humor

According to He Ziran&Shen Zhiqi (2004), deliberate misinterpretation (short for DMI) is a languagephenomenon that the hearer correctly understands the meaning of the utterance which the speaker intends toexpress in verbal communication, but in order to achieve some specific communicative goal, the hearerpurposely produces an utterance which in some way mismatches with the speaker’s intention by using somespecial context or some indeterminacy in the speaker’s utterance. By doing so, the hearer satisfies certaincommunicative needs of his own. Deliberate misinterpretation is quite different from misunderstanding which isthe accidental transmission of information.With Fauconnier’s Conceptual Blending Theory and Sperber&Wilson’s Relevance Theory as the generalconceptual framework, based on the research results of misunderstanding and deliberate misinterpretation ofscholars at home and abroad, this thesis focuses on two aspects: the key elements served as triggers of deliberatemisinterpretation and the realization mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation. The present study adoptsqualitative analysis, choosing the examples of deliberate misinterpretation in verbal humor in the classicalAmerican sitcom Friends (season5, season6and season7) and the American magazine Reader’s Digest (theyears of2009,2010and2012) as the data resources, and finally draws a conclusion by collecting data and thenclassifying and analyzing them.By analyzing the data according to the four basic types of integrated networks (simplex network, mirrornetwork, single-scope network and double-scope network) within the framework of the Conceptual BlendingTheory, the present study conducts a process analysis to the understanding of DMI from cognitive perspective inan attempt to find the answer to the first question. By doing so, it can help readers have a better understanding ofthe language phenomenon. At the end, the key elements served as the triggers of DMI in this thesis fall into tencategories: polysemy, homonymy, near-homonymy, indexical ambiguity, underspecification, illocution, deixis,inference, scope and idiom.According to Relevance Theory, the premise of all verbal communication is relevance. Communication infact is a psychological process in which interlocutors try to seek the optimal relevance under the governingprinciple of Relevance Theory in both ostension and inference. On the basis of the main contents of RelevanceTheory, the realization mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation in this paper falls into two aspects: one is thespeaker’s utterance and the other is the hearer’s inference. The speaker’s utterance further mainly contains theindeterminacy in the speaker’s utterance and the economic principle of the speaker’s utterance. And the hearer’s inference mainly falls into four categories: the incongruity to the encoding in the process of decoding; thedivergence to the ostension in the process of inference; the optimal relevance of the two utterances reaches to theminimal; the deliberate destroy of the mutual cognitive context.The present study of deliberate misinterpretation expands the research scope of the study related to thisissue, which is not only helpful for people to better understand of this language phenomenon, but also helppeople achieve an effective communication. Furthermore, in some certain situations, it may help people realizesome specific communicative goal and therefore set up a harmonious interpersonal relationship. In addition, itprovides implications for English learning and teaching.