A Pragmatic Study Of Deliberate Misinterpretation In How I Met Your Mother

Deliberate misinterpretation is a very common phenomenon in our daily communication. The study of it has received considerable attention. Most of the studies are related to logic, rhetoric and misunderstanding, however, few studies take it as a communicative strategy and an independent field of study. Therefore, it is necessary to construct a theoretical model to seek out the working mechanisms of deliberate misinterpretation, including its causes, means, and functions to help foster the understanding of this phenomenon. The present study is an attempt to construct a conceptual model based on adaptation theory and relevance theory.With the data taken from a popular American sitcom How I Met Your Mother, the present study is carried out centering on the following three research questions:(1) What causes deliberate misinterpretation? (2) What are the means by which deliberate misinterpretation is achieved? (3) What are the pragmatic functions of deliberate misinterpretation? And what are the general distribution of deliberate misinterpretation, the distributions and frequencies of its causes, means and functions? To address these questions,615 dialogues that use deliberate misinterpretation are collected and classified according to their causes, means and pragmatic functions.Detailed analysis of the collected data in the study indicates that:(1) Three external causes and two internal causes of deliberate misinterpretation are found out in the sitcom. The minimal information in S1’s utterance is the main external cause and ambiguity is the main internal cause. (2) The means to achieve deliberate misinterpretation are in three categories. Shifting the topic and the point is most widely used by the characters in the sitcom. (3) There exist three pragmatic functions of deliberate misinterpretation. The functions of adapting to the mental world and creating communicative effects are most commonly found out in this study.The findings in this study add some supporting evidence to validate the former studies and provide some insight for further theoretical exploration of deliberate misinterpretation. It helps people communicate skillfully in our daily communication. However, due to the limited number of collected data and limited knowledge of the researcher, a more systematic and robust model still awaits to cover the whole picture of deliberate misinterpretation.