Communication Misunderstanding
Table of Contents

1  Introduction .1
1.1     Previous Study ..1
1.2     Research Design ....2
2  Relevance Theory .2
2.1  Contextual effect/processing effort ...3
2.2  Principles of Relevance .5
2.3  Optimal Relevance Theory 5
3  Analysis of Business Communication Misunderstanding ...6
3.1  Misunderstandings Caused By Incomplete Ostensive Activity ...6
3.2  Misunderstandings Caused By Ambiguous Ostensive Information .8
3.3  Misunderstandings Caused By Incompatibility of Cognition Supplement ..9
4  Possible solutions to Eliminating Misunderstanding in Business Communication ..10
4.1 Avoidance of Communication Misunderstanding from Speaker’s Perspective .....10
4.2 Avoidance of Communication Misunderstanding from Hearer’s Perspective .12
Conclusion .14
Acknowledgements 16
Bibliography ..17
1 Introduction
With the popularization of business communication in various fields, there are many occasional elements that lead to communication misunderstanding. Communication misunderstanding is caused by the incompatibility between premise implication which hearers should supply and premise implication which speakers are supposed to express. These implications may exist in cultures, customs or inpidual cognitions. As it is known to all, business Communication is complete, polite, and accurate, while it also has exact goal. Thus, misunderstanding is surely not allowed in Business Communication. So how to avoid or eliminate misunderstanding in business communication is going to be an important proposition today.
1.1 Previous Study
There are some linguists specialize to misunderstanding from Relevance Theory. Jerry Thomas（1983）pided misunderstanding into two levels. The first level is hearer doesn’t understand the propositional meaning of context. The second level is hearer doesn’t understand the pragmatic meaning of context. He also puts up the meaning of misunderstanding. Thomas’s theory is simple and general, but not enough for practical use. In China, we also have many research scholars who try to explore various uses of Relevance Theory. For instance, Zhao Yi(1995)says that communication misunderstanding is a linguistic phenomenon which exists in the process that hearer makes mistakes in decoding. Zhou Lijuan(2003) thinks misunderstanding takes place when the information that the speaker wants to send out is not compatible with the information that hearer actually comprehends. These two opinions explain the misunderstanding separately from coding-decoding perspective and informative intention perspective. In Relevance Theory, it is usually considered that communication misunderstanding is caused by the compatibility between the implied premise that hearer actually complements and the implied premise that speaker wishes hearer to complement. Hence, both two sides must choose certain cognitive context to deal with certain implied premise. When they reach the optimal cognitive context, hearer can build strong relation with speaker’s words and make a inference that speaker wants. This relation is relevance. But cognitive context is always changing, both hearer and speaker should constantly complement and expand their own cognitive context. There are several ways to do: they can add the encyclopedia knowledge they have learnt; they can use the information which stored in short memories; they can also use information that come from surrounding scene. The causes communication misunderstanding has three explanations in this paper. They are:
1)Misunderstandings Caused By Incomplete Ostensive Activity
2)Misunderstandings Caused By Implied Premise
3)Misunderstandings Caused By Incompatibility of Cognition Supplement

1.2 Research Design
In this thesis, the main data of this paper are collected approximately 27 essays from CNKI. CNKI is the one of the largest digital museums in China and this part of essays consists 1/4 of it. Since the current research mainly adopt to qualitative methodology, there’re little intervention of experiments or treatments. The ultimate goal of this paper is to discover and understand phenomena that occur naturally in the daily business communication. 关联理论维度之交流环境中的误解探析(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_8317.html