A Pragmatic Study On Deliberate Misinterpretation In Home With Kids?from The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

Deliberate misinterpretation(DMI for short) is widely adopted by the language users as a communicative strategy to achieve special communicative purposes. Concretely speaking, it is a phenomenon that in verbal communication, language users tend to use special context or the vague and uncertain expressions of the other communicator to distort the other communicator 's intention in order to achieve a certain kind of communicative effect.The thesis explores DMI in the sitcom Home with Kids? from the perspective of Linguistic Adaptation Theory in order to reveal the triggers, the generative mechanism and the pragmatic functions of deli berate misinterpretation. To be specific, the thesis attempts to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the factors that trigger DMI in Home with Kids?? And what is the occurrence frequency of each trigger?(2) How is DMI realized by adapting to structural objects and communicative context in Home with Kids??(3) What are the pragmatic functions of DMI in Home with Kids??In order to answer the above three research questions, both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the present study, which is based on data analysis. The data sources used in the present study are the first fifty episodes of Home with Kids?, which is a popular Chinese sitcom. Firstly, all the conversations that contain the phenomenon of DMI are recognized and are written down, and the triggers of DMI are classified and the occurrence frequency of each trigger is calculated; Secondly, the generative mechanism of DMI is revealed under the Linguistic Adaptation Theory by analyzing typical conversations; Thirdly, th e pragmatic functions of DMI in the sitcom Home with Kids? are classified, and the percentage of each pragmatic function is presented in order to find which pragmatic function is mostly used in this sitcom.After the data analysis, main findings have been found. Firstly, DMI in the sitcom Home with Kids? can be triggered by(1) the minimal information;(2) indeterminacy of utterance meaning, which includes polysemy, homonymy, deixis and syntactic ambiguity. Compared with minimal information, the indeterminacy of utterance meaning is more likely to cause DMI, and among which, polysemy is the factor that is most likely to trigger DMI. Secondly, DMI is a pragmatic strategy that is the result of adapting to both structural objects and communicative context; And finally, there are four main pragmatic functions of DMI in the sitcom Home with Kids?: creating humorous effect, saving face, avoiding conflict and breaking ice, among which, creating humorous effect is the main pragmatic function of DMI in the sitcom.The findings of the present study have its theoretical and pedagogical implications. The Linguistic Adaptation Theory is adopted as the theoretical framework of the present study, which shows the applicability of the theory to analyze DMI; and the triggers, the generative mechanism and the pragmatic functions found in the present study give guidance to language users to use this pragmatic strategy better in order to achieve successful communication.