A Conversation Analysis Of Misunderstanding In Natural Conversation

Humans cannot avoid communicating with others in their daily life. They always hope to establish and/or maintain a harmonious relationship by communication, however, the emergence of misunderstanding not only impedes conversation, but also threatens the interlocutor’s face, thus misunderstanding stands in the path of the establishment of a harmonious relationship and goes against people’s communicative intension. For an effective communication, it seems quite important to see how people negotiate after the emergence of misunderstanding. Hence, a research about the misunderstanding in actual daily conversation is of profound theoretical and practical significance.Misunderstanding is an issue of concern for many researchers both at home and abroad over the last few decades. In the past, most researchers studied it mainly from the perspectives of philosophy, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, however, there is little literature available regarding this phenomenon itself. Hence, we adopted the method of conversation analysis to study the misunderstanding in daily conversation.To guarantee the objectivity of this study, one hundred recordings of misunderstanding in natural conversation were transcribed to locate the overall developmental process of misunderstanding. According to the person who realized the misunderstanding, this study divided misunderstanding into self-misunderstanding and other-misunderstanding. After analyzing the data, we found that the sequence patterns of different categories had some nuances among them and summarized four kinds of sequence patterns of misunderstanding. Then this study focused on the problem concerning the social actions of the turn which could prove the objective existence of misunderstanding. Finally the present study analyzed the specific resolvements of misunderstanding.Overall, this thesis analyzed misunderstanding from the perspective of conversation analysis, and it may serve as a valuable supplement to the studies on misunderstanding. The reconstructive social reality will not only increase people’s knowledge of the dynamic, interactive and negotiable natural of communication but also let people know the law of communication further.