Approaching Misunderstanding:an SCA Perspective

Misunderstanding (MIS) is a common phenomenon of language communication. It often has a various negative effect, and possibly results in interpersonal conflict. It takes time and energy for digestion and is often seen as communication error to be avoided and at least diminished. However, MIS seems to be everywhere and difficult to evade. This shows that the MIS is not a general sense of errors, its essential root is worth in-depth study.The source of MIS has always been the focus of misunderstanding research. Previous researches on MIS for quite a long time have been confined to the perspective of listeners, deeming that MIS exists only on the side of listeners and seems to have nothing to do with speakers. Traditional pragmatics theory often perceives communication as an ultimate process of cooperation dependent on context. The speaker has always been taken to make the utterance after having considered all the contextual factors, while the hearer has been envisaged to manage to recognize the speaker’s intention. In reality, the speaker cannot always fully retrieve what the speaker intends to convey. The effect is largely dependent on their prior context, especially the individual context, intentions, and emerging public knowledge/common sense, etc. That is, verbal communication is essentially a fusion of individual traits and social traits, the process of cooperation and ego-centrism symbiosis, which is what the SCA advocated "speaker-listener pragmatics".SCA functions as a supplementary effect on the traditional communication theory which lacks the integral "speaker-listener" perspective. Egocentrism in communication also provides a new resolution mechanism for the sources of MIS. This study, based on CG co-construction theory of SCA, is not confined to either the single speaker or the single listener, but for the whole process of communication. The author in this paper attempts to make a new interpretation on the source of misunderstanding. Egocentrism and Cooperation, two inherent attributes of communication, will inevitably lead to either success or failure. MIS is therefore unavoidable. It can be safely said that verbal communication is virtually a continuum of CG co-construction, and MIS occurs when/if information imbalance appeared in the process of co-construction. Naturally, with the advancement of language flow, more constructing factors getting involved, and the self-monitoring and adjustment by two parties of the communicators, when co-construction eventually is achieved, MIS will be dissolved accordingly.The paper explores the nature of misunderstanding from the new socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics (SCA). The author first reviews the background and the framework of SCA theory, then discusses the theory of Common Ground (CG) Co-construction under SCA, points out its definition, content and method of CG construction, and provides a parsing mechanism ------ taking speaker-listener as a whole to explore the essence of misunderstanding sources; then it further discusses the SCA "egocentrism" by resorting to the research in philosophy, cognitive science, and concludes that the essence of the misunderstanding lies in the "egocentrism" in communication. At last citing real cases, the author analyzes the failures of CG co-construction and the formation of MIS, including core CG co-construction failure and emergent CG co-construction failure.The study argues that "egocentrism" in communication can provide a unified analysis for various misunderstandings: on the one hand, the speaker can only predict what information the listener may know from the perspective of self-awareness; on the other hand, the listener can only base on his own prior knowledge and self-focus to speculate and reason what the speaker means. The result is, although both sides have the same goal of completing the verbal communication, yet that alone cannot guarantee that they can reach the state of mutual understanding.This study, putting an SCA "Speaker-Listener Pragmatics" into practice, aims at a clear understanding the sources of misunderstanding and, sheds new light on other related phenomena of verbal communication.