A Relevance-theoretic Approach To Deliberate Misinterpretation In Chinese Comic Skits

Deliberate misinterpretation (DMI) is a common language phenomenon in people’s daily communication and literary works. It is different from misunderstanding in nature. DMI happens when the hearer correctly understands the speaker but gives utterances different from the speaker’s expectation deliberately in order to achieve certain communicative goals.Comic skit is a popular art form in China. It tells stories of ordinary people, using humor or sarcasm to entertain people by verbal and nonverbal means. DMI is one of the verbal strategies often adopted in Chinese comic skits.The present study conducts a qualitative analysis of deliberate misinterpretation that occurs in verbal communication from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Relevance Theory is a relatively new approach in pragmatics, and it regards communication as a dynamic interaction between the speaker and the hearer. It tries to answer the basic question of the nature of communication, and the questions on how the interpretation process unfolds in the hearer’s mind. In the framework of Relevance Theory, this study attempts to answer the following two questions:1) how is DMI realized in Chinese comic skits?2) the causes of DMI in Chinese comic skits.The comic skits in the annual Spring Festival Gala of CCTV is chosen as the data source for this study.It is found that DMI is realized in Chinese comic skits at different levels: pronunciation, lexicon, syntax, pragmatics and rhetoric.Besides, the causes of DMI can be studied from three perspectives:1) the speaker’s perspective, this includes polysemy, indeterminacy of deictic expression, the speaker’s iHocutionary force, and information insufficiency;2) the hearer’s perspective, i.e. the hearer’s certain communicative needs, such as sarcasm, dissatisfaction or humor;3) the characteristic of Chinese language, this is explained in details in Chapter4.