Understanding Misunderstandings from Socio-cognitive Approach to Pragmatics

Abstract

Misunderstanding is an old and open question especially in the linguistic domain, but few concerns have put on this important topic recently. To reconsider this problem and offer instructive views, the new theoretical perspective and approaches are needed. A new theory "socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics" (SCA) dubbed by Istvan Kecskes offers a fresh angle for understanding misunderstandings. Other than traditional pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics, SCA standing in the middle point tries to integrate them and explain linguistic phenomenon with both social and cognitive factors. This study tries to examine misunderstandings under SCA, especially its view of Common Ground Co-construction. First, it is assumed that the root cause of misunderstanding lies in egocentrism, which are both an intrinsic property of verbal communication and a mechanism of individual thinking. Then, with a detailed analysis of CG co-construction deficiency and misunderstandings from the perspective of CG co-constructionism of SCA, it is illustrated how egocentrism causes different misunderstandings. In so doing, this study digs out the root cause of misunderstanding by taking speaker and hearer as a whole, and considering both the social factors and cognitive factors, which is a fresh practice on the "speaker-hearer pragmatic model" of SCA.

Avoidance of cognitive efforts as a risk factor in interaction

“…As a whole, a conversation is quite a risky undertaking consisting of minefields of various kinds, as described in the literature (see e.g. Bazzanella, 2019; Honghui and Dongchun, 2019 and the literature there). Although risk-taking is only seldom explicitly mentioned as a motivation for certain behaviour in interaction, it is present in all kind of encounters between people.…”

Communicative Analysis of Dialogical Interaction

“…The reason is that relationships in social groups are based on communicative actions which reflect both social and individual motivation, aspirations and mutual interdependence (Searle, 1979;Tarasov, 1990), which means that individuals tend to influence each other in communication (Liu et al, 2021) and this influence is conceptualized in terms of power (Atkinson, 2013;Martínez del Castillo, 2015;van Dijk, 2008). Curiously enough, while interacting linguistically, people are generally not aware of the fact that a power struggle takes place in an ordinary dialogue (Fairclough, 2001), which is actually a symbiosis of cooperation and, finally, egocentrism (Honghui & Dongchun, 2019).…”

Deliberate misinterpretation from the perspective of socio-cognitive pragmatics

“…Misinterpretation occurs in the stage of discourse comprehension, but what it reflects is a complete interactive communication process (Zhou, Chen, 2019). Deliberate misinterpretation happens when the meaning that the hearer misinterprets deliberately or misunderstands intentionally does not agree with what the speaker wishes to convey in his mind (Shen, 2004).…”