A Pragma-cognitive Account Of Deliberate Bickering

The present research is a pragma-cognitive account of deliberate bickering, alsocalled “tai gang” in Chinese slang, which is a frequent linguistic phenomenon indaily communication. It takes place when Party A correctly understands Party B’sutterance but deliberately misinterprets it, in which case he chooses to deliberatelydigress from the subjects to display his peculiarity or to correct Party B overtly toshow his superiority.Deliberate bickering can be taken as a kind of conflict talk but it is more definiteand narrowed and less hostile or destructive than conflict talk. Deliberate bickeringdiffers from argument in that it does not necessarily employ logical reasoning and itsdistinction from sophistry is that sophistry relies on deliberately using fallacious orflawed argument while deliberate bickering does not go against truth and commonsense. It is one specific linguistic phenomenon and deserves academic attention.Previous studies have explored its definitions, features, manifestations, functions andgeneration mechanism. This being the case, this research aims to give a thorough anddetailed explanation of deliberate bickering interpretation and analysis of responses todeliberate bickering.Relevance theory was raised by Sperber and Wilson first in1986, revised in1995and recently updated in2004. It is based on a definition of relevance and twoprinciples of relevance: a Cognitive Principle and a Communicative Principle. TheCognitive Principle of Relevance says that in human cognition, there is a tendency forcommunicators to achieve as many cognitive effects as possible for as littleprocessing effort as possible. The Communicative Principle of Relevance, responsiblefor the recovery of both the explicit and implicit content of an utterance, viz. theexplicature and the implicature respectively, communicates that every ostensivestimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance. After the stimulus, a setof assumptions will be activated and the hearer can represent necessary ones torecover explicatures and identify implicatures. This study finds that the hearer canresort to three sources, namely, linguistic context, encyclopedic knowledge andexpertise in some field, to construct contextual assumptions. Among those assumptions, some can be employed to develop the explicit content of deliberatebickering utterance, some can be taken as the implicated premises, and others can beconcluded as implicated conclusions. The process of constructing explicatures andimplicatures is developed in parallel rather than in sequence, and stabilized when theyare mutually adjusted so as to jointly confirm the hearer’s expectation of relevance.A meta-representation is a representation of a representation: a higher-orderrepresentation with a lower-order representation embedded within it, which meansthat it has different orders. Both the speaker and the hearer are deeply involved inmeta-representation: the speaker in meta-representing the thoughts he wants toconvey, while the hearer in meta-representing the speaker’s intentions. Full-fledgedinferential communication in humans draws on meta-representational ability toattribute underlying beliefs, intentions and desires to others. Deliberate bickeringinterpretation involves meta-representing others’ beliefs and intentions. As pointedout in this study, deliberate bickering interpretation involves fourth-ordermeta-representational ability.The prerequisite of deliberate bickering production is deliberatemisinterpretation. By adopting sophisticated understanding, the hearer can cope withdeceptive cases in which nothing more than the appearance of relevance is attemptedor achieved. In deliberate bickering interpretation the hearer needs to adoptsophisticated understanding to realize the speaker’s non-cooperativeness andrecognize his deliberate misinterpretation. Note that a fourth-ordermeta-representational ability is involved in sophisticated understanding.Based on descriptions above, a working model is derivable. This theoreticalframework is built on a combination of relevance theory, meta-representational abilityand sophisticated understanding. After hearing deliberate bickering, the hearer adoptsthe strategy of sophisticated understanding to recognize the speaker’s deliberatemisinterpretation. Aided by information from linguistic context, his encyclopedicknowledge and expertise in some field, the hearer can construct contextualassumptions to derive the explicature and identify the implicature. Deliberatebickering interpretation is fulfilled when he meta-represents the speaker’s intendedmeaning, which takes on contents similar to the implicated conclusion. This study finds that deliberate bickering interpretation is the employment of sophisticatedunderstanding and fourth-order meta-representational ability to retrieve the weakimplicature of deliberate bickering utterances, in which process the hearer needs toachieve enough cognitive effects to offset extra processing effort.This study also surveys responses to deliberate bickering. After a deliberatebickering turn, the hearer may choose to refute back, producing another turn ofdeliberate bickering, or keep silent or shift topics. It finds that responses can beclassified into two types,(i) refuting back; and (ii) echoing or keeping silent. Astatistic result shows that the second type, which can be further classified into echoing,shifting topics and speechlessness, covers about two-thirds of deliberate bickeringresponses. This study finds out that two reasons can account for this phenomenon, viz.the hearer’s incompetence and his consideration of politeness.