Informativeness-based Misunderstanding Repairing:Targets, Strategies, And Motivations

Misunderstanding is a common communicational phenomenon in our routine life. Its repairing can reflect the human ability of expression and comprehension. From such a perspective, we studied the misunderstanding repairing, respectively from the type of misunderstanding, strategy of repairing and motivation of repairing.Different types of misunderstanding have different internal characteristics, and the repairing must correspond to such characteristics when adopting different repairing strategies. Based on the Relevance-theoretic discussion of comprehension process, this study categorized misunderstanding into four major types:Ostensive Misunderstanding, Codal Misunderstanding, Explicature Misunderstanding, and Implicature Misunderstanding. There is a deductive informational embedded-ness in these four categories, for example, the deduction of implicature must be based on the correct comprehension of explicature:Just because optimal relevance cannot be obtained on the explicature level, the hearer will continue to deduce the implicature based on the content of explicature, thus with explicature included in the implicature. Based on this informational embedded-ness, repairing can handle the misunderstanding from different perspectives, not necessarily to supply the correct version of the misunderstood assumption (i.e. the Correspondent Repairing in this study), but also possible to repair from adjacent levels (i.e. the non-Correspondent Repairing in this study), so that the hearer would make cognitive calculation to derive at assumption of the misunderstood level from the repairing assumption level. While different effects arise from different repairing:Correspondent Repairing, simple and direct, is the most frequently used repairing strategy; non-Correspondent Repairing requires extra cognitive effort and will be compensated with extra cognitive effect. While some misunderstanding is interpersonally destructive, Correspondent Repairing might neglect others’ positive face and result in breaching the Politeness Principle, and the repairing of such sort of misunderstanding requires more discreet and euphemistic consideration. Considering the extra cognitive effect of non-Correspondent Repairing, and the need of such politeness, non-Correspondent Repairing becomes the natural solution.This study finds that Relevance Theory can help reveal the innate cognitive informativeness feature of misunderstanding, and can guide the misunderstanding repairing from such a perspective, so as to attain certain repairing effect. This study also points out that misunderstanding as an inevitable part of communication requires utmost obedience of each interpersonal rhetorical principle in its repairing.