On The Humor Of Deliberate Misinterpretation In Conversation

In speech communication, people always want to communicate smoothly by applying cooperative principle, politeness principle and relevance theory subconsciously. However, the phenomena which violate the principles above-mentioned often occur in daily verbal communication. It reflects a special language mechanism—deliberate misinterpretation rather than the communicators being uncooperative or impolite.We find deliberate misinterpretation usually leads to humor, and createing humor is a pragmatic function of deliberate misinterpretation mentioned by the famous linguist He Ziran, while it was only introduced as one of pragmatic functions, not analyzed it exactly. In fact, people always utilize the uncertain factors in speech conversation deliberately to distort speaker's real meaning in order to achieve our own humor, that is the application of deliberate misinterpretation, and we don't actually realize that it's a kind of pragmatic strategy, and ignore the relationship between deliberate misinterpretation and humor at the same time. By a lot of practical study and analyses, the author finds that in the process of conversation, deliberate misinterprestation often creates some humor by utilizing the uncertain factors in language or implied meaning of speakers. As a result, the thesis attempts to have a try in the aspect, which starts from deliberate misinterpretation, and finds out some effective ways for the humor of deliberate misinterpretation in the levels of pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and discourse.