Towards a Pragmatic Taxonomy of Misunderstandings

Abstract

The increasing emphasis given to the pragmatic perspective in the studies of everyday conversation over the last few decades has uncovered the reality which lies behind everyday conversation: the fact that communication is subject to risk and effort, and that we understand each other through continuous fallible hypotheses about our interlocutor’s intended interpretation. In this study, I address misunderstandings from a pragmatic (mainly relevance-theoretic) approach and analyse the reasons why they occur in face-to-face interaction. The main hypothesis underlying this paper is that all the possible varieties of misunderstanding can be accounted for in the outcome of the combination of three preliminary continua: intentional vs. unintentional; verbal vs. nonverbal; and explicit vs. implicit, which yields a taxonomy of twelve possible cases.