The Analysis Of Online News Misunderstanding Based On Adaptation Theory

Misunderstanding is a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon that can influence the success of communication.In the information era,the uniqueness of the Internet exacerbates the adverse effect of online news misunderstanding on both linguistic communication and social stability,economic construction,and political security.Numerous researches have been conducted on news misunderstanding from diverse perspectives.Nevertheless,those on news misunderstanding from the pragmatic perspective are fairly rare,let alone the researches on online news misunderstanding.This thesis conducts a qualitative analysis of online news misunderstanding exemplified by 20 pieces of English news on COVID-19 on the English news website and English social media from January to December of 2020.The research studies online news misunderstanding built upon Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory from a multimodal perspective,with the aim to analyze the causes,dynamic process,and psychological mechanism of online news misunderstanding.There are some major findings of this thesis.First,the appearance of online news misunderstanding is the outcome or the failure of linguistic choices interadaptable with contextual correlates.Second,the dynamic process of online news misunderstanding is the process of reconstruction of contextual correlates,exchange of news information and movement of the metapragmatic awareness controlling.Third,metapragmatic awareness of controlling linguistic selections can cause news misunderstanding.Theoretically,this research can prove the feasibility and explanatory power of Adaptation Theory on online news misunderstanding.Practically,it can provide certain avoiding suggestions for avoiding misunderstanding of online news.