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.
