An Exploration Of The Psychological And Cognitive Process Of DMI From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Deliberate Misinterpretation (DMI for short) is a common linguisticphenomenon in daily communication. Specifically speaking, in discoursecommunications, language users distort intentions of other speakers by making use ofcertain context or uncertain and vague expressions in others’ utterances to achievesome kind of communicative purpose. DMI could happen at different levels oflanguage, such as phonetic, semantic, syntactic and rhetorical levels. In terms of DMI,hearers have subjective intentions to misinterpret, while some objective factors suchas polysemy and homophones also make it possible for misinterpretation. This thesisaims to give a systemic analysis of DMI from the perspective of Relevance Theoryproposed by Sperber and Wilson.The production and comprehension of utterances is in fact the essence of DMI,and Relevance Theory studies the comprehension of utterances, therefore, RelevanceTheory has strong explanatory power over the study of DMI. This paper is going toexplore the psychological and cognitive process of DMI under the framework ofRelevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson. The present research answersthree questions:(1) what kind of factors contributes to DMI?(2) What are thepsychological and cognitive processes that underlie the speaker’s utterances?(3) Doesa difference in cultural background affect the production and comprehension of DMI?Corpus of this paper mainly comes from American situation comedy “The Big BangTheory”. Through analysis of its vivid dialogues, the research on DMI is enhanced; inthe meantime, the psychological and cognitive process is conducted from theperspective of Relevance Theory. In previous researches, almost all the scholarsfocused their attention on the universal nature of DMI, not taking cultural backgroundfactors into consideration. The creative point of this research is laid on systemicanalysis of psychological and cognitive process of DMI, taking cultural backgroundsuch as nationality difference into consideration. This research is helpful in guiding real-life communicational activities.Communication is the essential part of interactions in life and communicators canemploy DMI to implement certain pragmatic functions.