A Relevance-schematic Account Of Misunderstanding In Verbal Communication

Misunderstanding is common in verbal communication which often accompanies languagecommunication. Some misunderstandings can be realized by interlocutors and remedied throughnegotiations between conversation participants, but some are left unnoticed and give rise tocommunication failure. A large body of research has been done in this field and fruitfulachievements have been made. These researchers take different approaches and deal with it fromdifferent perspectives. For example, Richards (1936), Austin (1962) and Grice (1989) probe intothe issue in the perspective of language philosophy, Fabian (1997) ethnography, Tannen (1994)and Holmes (1995) social linguistics, Thomas (1983) and Gudykunst (1997) cross-culturalpragmatics as well as Sperber＆Wilson (1986/1995) and Yus Ramos (1998) from the vantagepoint of cognitive pragmatics. Domestic scholars, such as Zong Shihai (2000) and XiongXueliang (1999) have also greatly contributed to research within cognitive pragmatic framework.It can be easily seen from the above that the research on misunderstanding has stretched acrossmany disciplines. The research content, according to the references, dominantly centers on thedefinition, classification, formation mechanism, the influence on discourse and the avoidingstrategies of misinterpretation. However, they have not yet agreed on details in these areas. Thisthesis, on the basis of the previous studies, has the purpose of finding as synthetic andcomprehensive contributing factors as possible at the cognitive level.Relevance Theory was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in1986. After being broughtforward, it caused a great sensation in pragmatic arena. It has “the principle of relevance” and“mutual-manifestness” as its central ideas. It emphasizes the dominant roles of both the speakerand the hearer in verbal communication. It holds that the speaker has the informative intentionand the communicative intention both conveyed in a communication process and the hearer hasto employ “inference” to elicit the implied meaning of the utterance. Another great contributionof Relevance Theory is the invention of the notion of cognitive context. It provides a newdimension for research on misunderstanding and gives much inspiration to the researchmethodology of misinterpretation.Like Relevance Theory, Schema Theory also centers upon the probe into the underlyingcognitive mechanism of human beings. And it has gradually developed into a mature theorysince1970s. Schema is a memory construct in mind where information and experience are storedand represented. So its significance in understanding utterance interpretation is very obvious. Inrecent years, the theory has been put into researches on reading, listening and interpreting. And much practical results have been achieved, which undoubtedly gives testimony to the greatexplanatory power of the theory. Therefore the author of the thesis believes that schema, asinformation constructs in human mind, is sure to give insights to misunderstanding research.Besides, it has been pointed out early that schema theory is not contradictory to RelevanceTheory, instead, they are convergent in essential contentions. The two theories both make asubstantial attempt to delve into the underlying human cognition. Many scholars have attemptedto explain the formation mechanism of misunderstanding within the relevance theoreticframework but there has existed a ceiling as the triggering factors of misunderstanding are sowide in scope that it’s far from enough to get it explicated within one single theoretic framework.However, the integration of the two theories, in light of the above discussion, will undoubtedlybreak the bottleneck.This thesis takes the expositive approach featured by the combination of descriptive andexplanatory, static and dynamic. After a critical investigation of the theory and a thoroughanalysis of the linguistic data, the author concludes that the cause of misunderstanding fall intothree categories: factors on the speaker’s part, factors on the hearer’s part and contextual factors.The first category includes the speaker’s choice of expressions and prediction of the hearers’cognitive schema. The second category involves the activation of the hearer’s schema and his orher inference. The third has to do with the dynamic change of context in a communicationprocess and the difference in salience of a particular context to the conversation participants.After a systematic investigation of the theories and an in-depth analysis of the linguisticdata, the author tentatively proposes the cause of misunderstanding in verbal communication andmeanwhile obviously realizes its inevitability in daily communication. This research attempt isgreatly conducive to a more scientific knowledge of misunderstanding, thus beneficial toeffectively avoiding them in daily communication. However, its significance is much more thanthat. The study will also push forward people’s understanding of the working mechanism ofhuman cognition that underlies such two basic human activities as language production andlanguage interpretation, therefore greatly contributing to the progress of cognitive science andthe linguistic study within cognitive framework...