The structure of misunderstandings

In this paper we introduce a detailed and multi-faceted characterization of misunderstandings. The proposal attempts to capture the structure of misunderstandings in terms of several constructs: the message as intended by the speaker, the message as construed by the hearer, and the message as understood by an ‘objective’ judge. In addition, we suggest that the message the speaker intends the hearer to retrieve and the hearer’s perception of the speaker’s intentions should also be taken into account. Misunderstandings can also be classified according to the phase of the comprehension process at which they occur (the perception of the speaker’s message, its linguistic processing, discovering the implicatures, and so on).