A Study Of Types And Generative Mechanism Of Misunderstanding In Chinese Verbal Communication

This thesis attempts to make an investigation into the conversational phenomenon of misunderstanding in Chinese verbal communication from a pragmatic perspective based on the Relevance Theory proposed and developed by Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995).Four main research problems about misunderstanding are probed into. They are definition and extent, classification, generative mechanism and psychological roots. Misunderstanding in this thesis is defined as a conversational phenomenon in language understanding in which the hearer does not understand the meaning of an utterance in the way intended by the speaker (Zong Shihai, 2003). It is different from communication failure and pragmatics failure, non-understanding, ambiguity or purposive misinterpretation.Misunderstanding is classified into two broad categories in light of the distinction between explicature and implicature in Relevance Theory: misunderstanding of explicit meaning and misunderstanding of implicated meaning. The former is further categorized into misunderstanding of propositions and misunderstanding of references while the latter is further subdivided into misunderstanding of pragmatic force and misunderstanding of conversational implicature.The focus of the project is the study on the generative mechanism of misunderstanding which is concerned with the discussion of the roots of misunderstanding and the interaction of these causes. It is held that there are two roots for the generation of the problem concerned: the speaker's utterance and the mentality of the hearer (Zong Shihai, 2003). The former is characterized by the discrepancy or mismatch between the two interlocutors' linguistic knowledge, and the indeterminacy of the utterance meaning or the fuzziness of the language;the latter by the general mentalities and the social mentalities related to the hearer's social status and the social distance between interlocutors. The two roots constantly interact with each other. First,the speaker's utterance more or less bears the chance of being misunderstood or misinterpreted. Second, the hearer's situations and especially the hearer's mentality help to bring about the occurrence of misunderstanding. These conditions are indispensable for the generation of misunderstandings in Chinese verbal communication.The second root of misunderstanding is the more important of the two and, accordingly, receives a special treatment. Previous studies on general mentalities were all faulty in that they did not concretize these mentalities, and few efforts were exerted upon the discovery and understanding of the general and social mentalities giving rise to misunderstanding. This thesis, based upon the large quantity of misunderstanding-related data collected in natural conversations, novels, TV programs and film script and through questionnaires, proposes concretizing general mentality as "conventional mentality" and social mentalities as "self-inclination" and "self-protection" after Zong Shihai's researches.This study will not only deepen our understanding of the relevant conversational phenomenon, but prove to be of enormous value to pragmatic studies as well. Though it is based on Chinese data, the classification and discussion on the generative mechanism of misunderstanding will certainly shed light on the understanding of misunderstanding existent in other languages and in cross-cultural communication.