A Cognitive-pragmatic Study of Deliberate Misinterpretation

Deliberate misinterpretation (DMI for short) is carried out as a communicative strategy in verbal communication. In a conversation, the hearer of the interlocutors makes use of a special context to misinterpret the speaker's intended meaning with the purpose to fulfill his communicative intentions. The studies are not in-depth enough so that the discussions on it are often the "by-studies" in the researches of misunderstanding (MIS for short); however, the two phenomena are often confused. Relevance Theory, which explains the utterance interpretation from the hearer's angle, provides a new perspective. In this thesis, the hearer's cognitive-inferential process towards the speaker's explicature is drawn briefly with a figure to make a further explanation to the operating mechanisms of DMI. Though the present study is a preliminary one on DMI, the author hopes that it can benefit the research of verbal communication in the light of Relevance Theory.