A Study Of Verbal Misunderstanding In Pride And Prejudice

In communicative interaction, language is the bridge of communication betweenhumans. However, misunderstandings happen from time to time for a variety of reasons,thus leading to the failure of communication. The current dissertation discusses differentkinds of linguistic misunderstandings and the inherent relationship between linguisticmisunderstanding and personality traits in Pride and Prejudice under the framework ofrelevance theory.The studies of human communication by pragmatists have passed through threestages: from the early code model, the inferential model (cooperative principle) proposedby Grice to Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory. According to relevance theory,communication is seen as an ostensive-inferential process and is relevance-oriented. Inorder to achieve a successful communication, the hearer needs to retrieve relevantcognitive assumptions and abides by the principle of optimal relevance to assist her inunderstanding the utterance that the speaker expresses. However, if the cognitive contextdrawn by the hearer is different from the one that the speaker holds, communication willbe affected and misunderstanding may come into being.Zong Shihai classifies misunderstanding into two types based on the standard ofmeaning: misunderstanding of sentence meaning—misunderstanding of proposition andmisunderstanding of referent; misunderstanding of utterance meaning—misunderstanding of pragmatic force and misunderstanding of conversational implicature.The former refers to the misunderstanding of individual words, phrases or referents,which belongs to the misunderstanding of explicature. The latter means themisunderstanding of the meaning of speech acts and indirect words, which belongs to themisunderstanding of implicature. The current research tends to choose Zong’s taxonomyof misunderstanding to classify linguistic misunderstanding in Pride and Prejudice. There are2examples of linguistic misunderstanding belonging to misunderstanding ofsentence meaning, and the other17examples belonging to misunderstanding of utterancemeaning, accounting for about90percent.By applying relevance theory to the analysis of linguistic misunderstanding in Prideand Prejudice, this paper aims to have a better understanding of the generativemechanism of misunderstanding. Firstly, in the course of interpretation, the meaning ofsome words and referents is so ambiguous as to result in misunderstanding. Secondly,people draw different cognitive assumptions to process the same utterance due todifferent genders, beliefs, values and social classes, so misunderstanding comes intobeing. Thirdly, the speaker sometimes expresses less relevant information incommunication if she wants to satirize the hearer or somebody else. That is to say, thespeaker deliberately misleads the hearer, and she (the speaker) has to be responsible forthe occurrence of misunderstanding. Lastly, some misunderstandings occur due to thehearer’s great disposition flaw and low intelligence, such as Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins.Misunderstanding is more likely to occur and harder to overcome if this kind of personsare involved in conversations. In addition, the research reveals that people’s characterscan be reflected at least in part from the linguistic misunderstandings. However, there isstill subjectivity in classifying linguistic misunderstanding in this novel, which may haveinfluence upon the findings of the current study.