A Pragmatic Analysis On DMI In A Dream Of Red Mansions From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Language is the carrier of human communication, and its interpretation is regarded as a vital constituent part in the communication process. When the hearer cannot comprehend the conveyed meaning from the speaker, misunderstanding occurs. Interestingly, there is a special pragmatic strategy used in human communication by way of deliberately misinterpreting the communicator’s utterance on the ground of correctly perceiving his or her meaning. The strategy in language use is technically called as deliberate misinterpretation(DMI for short).The DMI pragmatic strategy is applied frequently both in daily life and literary works. The discourse or conversation in the novel A Dream of Red Mansions is very representative among classical fictions for its vivid descriptive words, simple but flexible sentence structure, meaning connotation. All we have in reading the novel is such an appreciation and enjoyment that we have the motive in tasting it. DMI, within these virtues, has no exception helping to create tasteful conversations and build true disposition characters. For this reason, the thesis conducts a qualitative analysis of DMI used by the characters in A Dream of Red Mansions from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Relevance Theory points out that verbal communication is a purposeful, intentional activity between the speaker and the hearer. As it involves with how people infer the communicative meaning, it has a strong explanation force in utterance understanding. Within the relevance-theoretical framework, this thesis explores the generation and realization mechanism of the DMI in A Dream of Red Mansions on the basis of the achievements in the enquiry of this area. It intends to answer the following two questions:(1) What is the generation mechanism of deliberate misinterpretation?(2) How is the deliberate misinterpretation realized, in other words, what is the realization mechanism of DMI?It is found that there are two factors that will produce DMI: one is the objective perspective that there are some indeterminacies in the speaker’s utterance, and the other is the subjective perspective that the hearer has certain communicative purpose. The indeterminacies existing in the speaker’s utterance such as economical information, polysemy, deictic ambiguity and so on is the objective condition. The intention to achieve a certain communicative goal such as making request, satirizing, making fun, rejecting drives the hearer to take advantage of the indeterminate information with a deliberate misinterpretation. As for the realization mechanism, the hearer makes use of three approaches to operating a deliberate misinterpretation according to Relevance Theory:(1) Deviating the ostension in the inferential process;(2) Breaking the mutual cognitive environment;(3) Minimizing the optimal relevance.The thesis attempts to discuss the DMI strategy in the novel A Dream of Red Mansions from the perspective of Relevance Theory. The author thinks that the findings may be helpful for readers to understand the literary characters’ utterance, and they may also be of great significance for language learners to improve communicative competence to smooth our communication.