An Adaptation-relevance Approach To Deliberate Misinterpretation In American Sitcom, How I Met Your Mother

Deliberate misinterpretation (hereafter DMI) is not only a special linguisticphenomenon, but also a special pragmatic strategy. It is different from the misunderstandingfrom the essence. Misunderstanding means that the one side of the communicationunderstands the other side wrongly because of the deficient information in thecommunication. However, deliberate misinterpretation means that the one side of thecommunication deliberately misunderstands the information that the other side provides bymaking use of the some characteristics of the information in order to achieve his or her owncommunication purpose. As a widespread but special phenomenon in our verbalcommunication, deliberate misinterpretation has its own particular pragmatic purposes andspecific pragmatic effects. It is so popular in verbal communication that people, even somelinguists, just take it for granted. The studies of DMI are sporadic and most of them areaccidentally touched when linguists study misunderstanding. Its importance to theconstruction and understanding of verbal communication has not received enough attentionand systematic research from linguists. Therefore, a more comprehensive work on it isurgently needed.Based on the previous studies and related research on the deliberate misinterpretation,the present research is intended to probe into deliberate misinterpretation from theadaptation-relevance model which combines Verschueren’s adaptation theory with Sperber&Wilson’s relevance theory. Through analyzing, the paper concludes that the generationmechanism of deliberate misinterpretation includes conversational implicature, indirectspeech act, the speaker’s minimal information, the vagueness of the speaker’s language(homophony, polysemy, deictic) and rhetoric. Based on the generation mechanism, thefollowing pragmatic functions of the deliberate misinterpretation shown in the Americansitcom How I met your mother are analyzed: creating humorous effect, creating the ironic effect, protecting the faces, improving the relationship, manipulating the information,avoiding answering the problem, wreaking the dissatisfied emotion and so on. By completelylearning about the generation mechanism and pragmatic function of the deliberatemisinterpretation, the author hopes that they can be better used in people’s dailycommunication to achieve their own communicative purpose.