The structure of misunderstandings*

Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In this paper we introduce a detailed and multi-faceted characterization of

misunderstandings. The proposal attempts to capture the structure of misunder-
standings 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).

Keywords: conversation, discourse, misunderstanding, non-understanding,

speaker intention

1. Introduction

Behind nearly all verbal interactions there lurks the danger of misunderstanding
(cf. Blum-Kulka and Weizman 1988), and the allegation of pretending to misun-
derstand is common in controversies (Dascal 2003: 280–292). In the present paper
we attempt a conceptual clarification of misunderstandings, real and pretended.
The phenomenon of misunderstanding has been discussed in the literature
from a variety of different angles and has received special attention in sociolin-
guistic and discourse analyses. Differing approaches to misunderstanding have
chosen to focus on distinct aspects of the phenomenon, a fact which has led to
varying characterizations, relying on differing methodological frameworks. Some
researchers have attempted to characterize at what stage in the conversation a mis-
understanding is detected and corrected (cf. for example, Bazzanella and Damiano
1999), while others have concentrated on how misunderstandings are managed in
discourse (cf. for instance, Humphreys-Jones 1986; Schegloff 1987, 1992; Trognon
and Saint-Dizier 1999; Bazzanella and Damiano 1999; Dascal 2003: 313–316).

Pragmatics & Cognition 16:3 (2008), 568–585.  doi 10.1075/p&c.16.3.07sch

issn 0929–0907 / e-issn 1569–9943 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 The structure of misunderstandings 569

Grimshaw (1980) discusses responses to and other effects of misunderstandings,

and Taylor (1986) has broached the question of how we know that the hearer has
understood the speaker. Yet others (Bazzanella and Damiano 1999; Weigand 1999,
for example) have proposed a typology of misunderstandings according to their
causes. Dascal (2003: 280–302) provides a useful overview of major studies carried
out with respect to misunderstanding.
The purpose of the present paper is different. We attempt to capture the struc-
ture of misunderstanding in terms of the assumptions and intentions of the in-
terlocutors as mediated by their utterances. In addition to the standpoints of the
speaker and the hearer, we consider a ‘neutral’ standpoint. The proposed param-
eters, considered jointly, permit to identify types of misunderstandings that previ-
ous analyses have not recognized as such.
An additional classificatory principle, based on the various aspects of the com-
prehension process at which misunderstandings can occur, is developed in the last
section of the paper.
The term ‘misunderstanding’ will be used here in a wider sense than that in
common parlance: any departure from “perfect” communication we will call ‘mis-
understanding’, which includes what commonly are called ‘partial understanding’
and ‘non-understanding’ (see Section 8).

2. Hearer-caused and speaker-caused misunderstandings

Understanding, according to Locke (1960: III, 9, 6), occurs when words “excite in
the Hearer exactly the same Idea they stand for in the mind of the Speaker”, and
this view is shared by many classical authorities from Aristotle to Hobbes (Tay-
lor 1986: 82). A more modern approach refers to “the correspondence between
A’s and B’s [i.e., the speaker’s and the hearer’s] perception of a ‘conversational de-
mand’” (Dascal 2003: 306).We can capture this approach by letting M(S) stand for
the message that the speaker (S) intends her utterance to convey, and M(H) for the
message that the hearer (H) ascribes to the utterance — where the term ‘message’
remains unanalyzed for the time being (but see Section 9) — and defining under-
standing as M(S) = M(H). On the face of it, a misunderstanding might accordingly
be symbolized simply by M(S) ≠ M(H).
This formula, however, acknowledges only the fact that a misunderstand-
ing has occurred; it says nothing about the type of misunderstanding — whether
it is due to the speaker’s inappropriate phrasing or to the hearer’s shortcoming,
whether it has been unintended or faked, and so on. As will be shown, additional
concepts are needed for a taxonomy of misunderstandings.
570 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

Consider, first, an important distinction that lies behind the following two
misunderstandings:
(1) A1: Can you give me a ride home?
B: Oh, I’m afraid I have a flat tire.
A2: But can you take me home?

A obviously fails to retrieve what is implicated by B’s utterance, namely that he

cannot take her home because of the flat tire. The misunderstanding must be laid
at the hearer’s (i.e., A2’s) door: hearers can usually be expected to understand what
B has here implicated. Compare this to
(2) S1: Suddenly the rain started to pour down, and he took cover in a house.
H: Did he know the people there?
S2: What do you mean? Wasn’t he living with them?

By “a house” S1 meant ‘his own house’, whereas H understands this as ‘someone

else’s house’. The speaker could have taken “special care to prevent misunderstand-
ing” (Dascal 2003: 315), but in the present example he used a misleading expres-
sion in referring to his own house and thus caused this misunderstanding.1 The
simplistic formula M(S) ≠ M(H) does not capture the distinction between misun-
derstandings caused by the speaker — as in (2) — and those caused by the hearer
— as in (1). What is missing here is a link mediating between M(S) and M(H). The
speaker’s and hearer’s minds after all do not communicate with each other directly,
but only (in the cases to be considered in this paper) through the medium of a
linguistic utterance. One can abstract from the interpretations of the particular
speaker and hearer, and the message carried by an utterance can be understood on
the basis of the conventions of language and the context of the utterance.
We suggest, then, that in addition to M(S) and M(H) a third concept be intro-
duced into our conceptual apparatus: the way a “faultless hearer” (Hockett 1986:
53, 57) understands the speaker’s utterance.2 Let us symbolize this as M(A) where
A stands for the analyst (assumed to be an idealized, faultless hearer). The analyst’s
interpretation, by definition, adheres to the semantic and pragmatic rules of the
language,3 whereas the speaker and/or the hearer may fail at times to do so, and
this failure may result in speaker-caused or hearer-caused misunderstandings.4 In
(1), the analyst will understand the message in the way intended by the speaker
— M(S) = M(A) — whereas the way the hearer understands it differs from both
M(S) and M(A). In (2), the analyst holds that the utterance conveys a message that
differs from the one the speaker intended it to convey. The symbol N will be used
for a message that differs from M in the example analyzed; that is, besides M(A)
and M(H) there may be N(A) and N(H). Examples (1) and (2) will accordingly be
symbolized as in [1.1] and [1.2], respectively:
 The structure of misunderstandings 571

[1.1] M(S) M(A) N(H)

[1.2] M(S) N(A) N(H)

The difference between M and N may lie in either (a) N differing from M or (b) N
not including an aspect of M (this point will be taken up in Section 8).
A misunderstanding may be both speaker-caused and hearer-caused: the
speaker may phrase her utterance in a way that does not correspond with her in-
tentions and the hearer erroneously understands this utterance in a way that does
not correspond with the way the analyst reads it. Using the symbols N1 and N2 for
two messages that each differ from M. we can symbolize this as in [1.3]:
[1.3] M(S) N1(A) N2(H)

Such misunderstandings are probably rare.5

Consider now that an utterance may convey a message that is ambiguous in its
particular context; for instance:6
(3) H1: How was your vacation? Go anywhere interesting?
S1: I couldn’t afford to, and even if I had the money, I had a lot of marking
to catch up on. Then I was interviewing all last week.
H2: Yes, of course.
S2: What about you?
H3: Oh, well I don’t do admissions any more. Used to, of course.
S3: No, I mean did you go anywhere interesting? (after Falkner, 1997: 118)

What S2 meant becomes apparent only by his reaction in S3. The question “What
about you?” (S2) might be understood in either one of two ways, both ‘sanctioned’
by the analyst: as referring to the work load (proximal topic) or to the vacation
(distal topic). We therefore deploy M1 and M27 — rather than M and N — and a
slash for disjunction:
[1.4] M1(S) M1/ M2(A) M2(H)

This, too, is a speaker-caused misunderstanding, since it is due to the speaker hav-

ing failed to choose an unambiguous way of expressing herself in a way that does
not leave room for misunderstandings. As a result, the ‘analyst’ construes her ut-
terance as M1/M2.
Ambiguity is also involved in double entendres. In [1.5], the speaker intends
to communicate two meanings, M1 and M2, and M1& M2(A) indicates that her
utterance was formed according to her intention. Since H ‘gets’ only one of the two
meanings (namely, M1) and is deaf to the other one, this is a misunderstanding (of
a perhaps rather harmless kind):
[1.5] M1& M2(S) M1& M2(A) M1(H)
572 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

This is a hearer-caused misunderstanding (albeit only a partial one, since H at least

retrieves one of the messages, M1).
The foregoing include some of the more common types of misunderstanding.
The list, however, is not exhaustive. There are still other possibilities. For instance,
a hearer may detect an unintended ‘double entendre’; this would be symbolized by
M1(S) M1&M2(A) M1&M2(H). Instead of enumerating all possibilities, we will
deal in the following sections with types that require an extension of the concep-
tual apparatus introduced in the foregoing.

3. Further types

There are types of misunderstanding that differ in important ways from those
dealt with in the previous section. In everyday parlance, some of these will per-
haps be called partial understanding, or, perhaps, even ‘full’ understanding, but it
is proposed here to use ‘misunderstanding’ as a theoretical term; we return to this
question in Section 6, below. It turns out that a formal description of these types
cannot be carried out by means of the concepts introduced so far, and our concep-
tual apparatus will have to be augmented.
Consider the following cases, a–h:
(a) A speaker is uncooperative and phrases her utterance with the intention that
the hearer misunderstands it; and the hearer in fact misunderstands it.
(b) As in (a), but counter to the speaker’s intention, the hearer does understand
her.
(c) The speaker’s utterance involves a double entendre, but she does not want the
hearer to understand the secondary meaning. The hearer in fact does not un-
derstand it.
(d) As in (c), but the hearer does in fact understand it.
(e) S expresses herself infelicitously, in a way that will usually engender a misun-
derstanding, but H nevertheless understands what she intended to say. For
instance, H may know S well and intuitively detect the latter’s imperfectly ex-
pressed intention.
(f) The hearer detects a second meaning that was not intended by S.
(g) The hearer only pretends to have misunderstood the speaker. For example:
(4) Client: Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?
Waiter: It looks like the breaststroke, sir.

The waiter only pretends to understand the client’s words as an informative

question but in fact knows that the client wanted to complain.
 The structure of misunderstandings 573

(h) The speaker contrives a misunderstanding, that is, she manages to make H
understand her in a way that S then pretends not to have intended. For ex-
ample:
(5) S1: Do you know what is nice about you?
H: No.
S2: Too bad, I had hoped that you would be able to tell me.
(after Falkner 1997: 112)

Unlike the speaker in (4), the speaker here presents a different analysis of her
own previous utterance. In the following sections we introduce additional
concepts to deal with these, and several other cases.

4. Speaker’s intention

The term ‘speaker’s intention’, as used in the present paper, stands in need of clari-
fication. M(S) has been defined as the message that the speaker intends her utter-
ance to convey. Normally, this is also the message the speaker intends the hearer to
understand, but not always. Occasionally a speaker may phrase her utterance with
the intention that the hearer misunderstands it. Consider:
(6) Mother: Have you done [a] the washing up and [b] put everything away?
Little girl [=S]: I have done the washing up.
M(S) = I have done [a]; (implicated:) but not [b].

Suppose now that while the little girl has truthfully refrained from denying that she
hasn’t fully complied with her duties, she hopes that her mother won’t notice what
is implicated by her answer. While she intended her utterance to convey the full
message, including the implicature (‘I have not done [b]’), she intends her mother
to misunderstand the message i.e., to retrieve M(S) without the implicature.
Suppose, further, that her (perhaps momentarily inattentive) mother retrieves
only what the girl intended her to: ‘I have done [a]’, which differs of course from
the full M(S). This case, then, might be analyzed: M(S) M(A) N(H), where N(H)
equals M(S) minus the implicature, ‘I have not done [b]’.
Now, this formula does not show what the girl intends her mother to un-
derstand. What is needed here is an additional concept of speaker inten-
tion alongside that of M(S). We propose to use the term speaker’s intention
— or S-int., for short — for the message the speaker intends the hearer to retrieve,8
and to retain M(S) — or M1/M2(S), M1&M2(S) — for the message the speaker in-
tends the utterance to convey. Usually, the two kinds of intention will be identical,
but in our example, the two will differ. The formalization for that example will be:
574 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

[3.1] M(S) M(A) N(H) S-int.: N(H)

Such divergences between M(S) and S-int. are by no means rare. One has only to
think of a witness testifying at court, who bewares of uttering a lie but hopes that
the statement implicated by her answer will escape notice. Or think of someone
telling the truth in technical language which she knows the hearer to be unlikely
to understand.
Opinions may be divided as to whether an example like this deserves the ap-
pellation ‘misunderstanding’ (because the mother failed in retrieving the implica-
tion contained in M) or not (because she understood the utterance in the way
the girl wanted her to). But, as stated, we propose to use ‘misunderstanding’ as
a theoretical term which stands for a concept that may differ in several respects
from the pre-theoretical concept. There are many other cases that are not usually
called misunderstanding, which we will discuss presently.
The child’s intention in (6) may be frustrated: her mother may catch on and
retrieve the implicated meaning. In that case we write:
[3.2] M(S) M(A) M(H) S-int.: N(H)

The distinction between the two kinds of intention, M(S) and S-int., will also be
needed in analyzing a double entendre which the speaker intends the hearer not
to notice (say, in order to make fun of him or show off in front of a third party).
Then there are two possibilities:
1. The addressee in fact fails to notice the secondary meaning:
[3.3] M1&M2(S) M1&M2(A) M1(H) S-int.: M1(H)

2. The addressee “disappoints” the speaker and does recover the secondary
meaning:
[3.4] M1&M2(S) M1&M2(A) M1&M2(H) S-int.: M1(H)

The S-intention is what distinguishes [3.3] from the misunderstood double enten-
dre analyzed in [1.5]. In [1.5], it might also have been appropriate to add S-int.,
that is, to adopt [3.5] instead of [1.5].
[3.5] M1&M2(S) M1&M2(A) M1(H) S-int.: M1&M2(H)

But since the S-intention, M1&M2(H), does not diverge from the speaker’s inten-
tions –M1&M2(S) — it can be dispensed with or else optionally added. The same
holds for the other examples in Section 2.
A speaker may be unaware of the fact that what she says has two meanings
(i.e., a kind of unintended double entendre). For instance:
 The structure of misunderstandings 575

(7) Finance minister: We have been standing on an economic precipice,

and we have taken a great step forward.

Presumably the minister meant both clauses to be taken metaphorically (we have
been saved from a calamity by the steps we have taken) and did not intend to
convey the meaning that some of his audience will gleefully note, namely, that
‘we’ have fallen into the abyss. But the audiences presumably know that this was
not the speaker’s intention, which is why the joke is on the minister. The analysis
will be:
[3.6] M1(S) M1&M2(A) M1&M2(H) S-int.: M1(H)

5. Hearer’s perspective

We now introduce an additional concept that is required for the analysis of yet
other cases. Suppose the mother in example (6) correctly retrieves the implicature
in M(S) and also recognizes the girl’s intention to have her mother misunderstand
her. Then we will want to show in the analysis not only the speaker’s intention as
to what the hearer should retrieve but also the hearer’s perception of the speaker’s
intention. We call this H-perspective and insert it in the second row of the for-
mula. H-perspective, or H-persp., for short, relates to (a) what H believes S to have
intended her utterance to convey, and (b) what H believes to be the S-intention:
[4.1] M(S) M(A) M(H) S-int.: N(H)
H-persp.: M(S) N(H)

This formula shows that while the hearer correctly understood the full message
with its implicature — M(H) — she also realizes (a) what the speaker intended the
utterance to mean, namely M(S), and (b) that the speaker intended her to misun-
derstand it: N(H). In this example, H-perspective is identical to the corresponding
M(S) and S-int. But the H-perspective may be mistaken. Imagine a scenario where
the mother wrongly suspects the little girl of intending that the implicature ‘I did
not put everything away’ go unnoticed; the girl, though, was completely guileless:
her S-intention was M(H). Then, instead of [4.1], we have:
[4.2] M(S) M(A) M(H) S-int.: M(H)
H-persp.: M(S) N(H)

There are still other possibilities. When S has expressed herself infelicitously, H
may nevertheless understand what she intended to say. For instance, H may know
S well and intuitively detect the latter’s imperfectly expressed intention. If H is an
expert, say, a medical doctor, he may understand imperfectly described symptoms.
576 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

Or H may know that S is a native speaker of another language and ‘back translate’
the utterance into that language. Or the speaker may intentionally use a devious
way of expression, expecting the hearer — but perhaps not anyone else — to guess
at the intended message; which he does. In short, H may ‘bypass’ the infelicitous
phrasing of S:
[4.3] M(S) N(A) N(H) S-int.: M(H)
H-persp.: M(S) M(H)

Such ‘bypassing’ may be detected in subsequent turns; e.g., when H corrects the
first speaker (by repeating her words with a correction or by saying: “you mean…”,
etc.).
But a hearer’s attempt at bypassing can be erroneous: the speaker may have
meant what she said (that is, what the analyst and the hearer believes her utterance
to convey). As in [4.2], this will result in a divergence of H-persp. from the corre-
sponding symbols in the first line, but the H-persp. will differ from that in [4.2]:
[4.4] M(S) M(A) M(H) S-int.: M(H)
H-persp.: N(S) N(H)

While the hearer correctly construes what the speaker said (this is indicated by
M(H) in the first line), his lack of ‘trust’ in the felicitously worded utterance leads
to his misunderstanding of what the speaker meant.
Now, the speaker may not only have the intention that the hearer understand
her utterance in a certain way but also intend the hearer to have a certain per-
spective. In [4.4], for instance, she may intend the hearer to have the H.-persp.
he actually entertains — N(S) … N(H) — or else a different perspective. In other
words, there can be a second-order S-intention, the object of which is the hear-
er’s perspective. Further, the latter can in its turn be the object of a second-order
H-perspective. S-int. and H-persp., then, can alternate and apply recursively. We
will not illustrate here the symbolization of such higher-order S-int. and H-persp.,
which in any case are much rarer.

6. Understanding and misunderstanding defined

We can now define understanding and misunderstanding in terms of the concepts

introduced so far. Consider first understanding. The prototypical example of suc-
cessful communication would be:
[5.1] M(S) M(A) M(H) S-int.: M(H)
H-persp.: M(S) M(H)
 The structure of misunderstandings 577

When an utterance is ambiguous and H understands it in the way intended by S,

this may be symbolized as follows (compare this to [1.4]):
[5.2] M1(S) M1/ M2(A) M1(H) S-int.: M1(H)
H-persp.: M1(S) M1(H)

Again, when H understands an utterance as a double entendre, we write:

[5.3] M1&M2(S) M1&M2(A) M1&M2(H) S-int.: M1&M2(H)
H-persp.: M1&M2(S) M1&M2(H)

There are three properties that [5.1]-[5.3] have in common, and we suggest that
these be regarded as necessary and jointly sufficient features of ‘understanding’:
1. The message recovered by the hearer is identical to the one the speaker in-
tended the utterance to convey; in symbols: X(S) = X(H), where X stands for
any expression (e.g., M, M1&M2).
2. The S-int. does not differ from what the hearer actually recovered, namely
X(H).
3. There is no discrepancy between the H-persp. and the corresponding X(S) and
S-int.
As for misunderstandings, it is proposed that this term be used to refer to any
communicative interaction that falls short of meeting any one of the three above
conditions defined in the preceding. ‘Misunderstanding’, in the proposed termi-
nology, thus applies to cases like (a)–(f) in Section 3 — which have been analyzed
in Sections 4 and 5, as well as what is sometimes called ‘partial understanding’ and
‘non-understanding’ (the latter concept will be discussed in Section 8 below), in
short, to any divergence from ‘perfect’ understanding, as defined in the preceding.
We thus deploy ‘misunderstanding’ as a theoretical term, whose usage departs in
some respects from that of the corresponding pre-theoretical one. Next we turn
to cases (g) and (h) considered in Section 3, which necessitate the introduction of
additional symbols.

7. Pretended misunderstandings

Not all failures of communication are genuine mistakes. Misunderstandings may

be feigned or faked. When the hearer feigns a misunderstanding, this will become
evident in his response to the speaker. In a faked misunderstanding, the speaker
attempts to mislead the hearer by contriving (usually with the intention of being
funny or sarcastic) what may look like a misunderstanding. This will become ap-
parent when the speaker subsequently responds to the hearer’s turn.
578 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

(a) Feigned misunderstandings.

An example of a feigned misunderstanding is (4), given in Section 3. Here is an-
other one:
(8) Eileen: I have really missed Paddy.
Herb: Yes, me too — by two inches. (after Nerlich and Clark 2001)

Note, first, that here the three conditions of correct understanding are clearly
satisfied: Herb presumably knows what Eileen meant by “missed”. In (4), the
waiter, unless he is uncharacteristically dumb, knows that the guest wants to
complain. The formula applicable to the first speaker should therefore be the
same as that of a correct understanding; cf. [5.1]. What makes these examples
different from [5.1] is that implicit in the second speaker’s (the waiter’s, Herb’s)
turn is an interpretation of the previous speaker’s turn. This implicit interpre-
tation diverges from the one which we, as analysts, impose on the first turn,
and will be represented in a separate line in lower case letters: Herb pretends to
understand Eileen’s words as conveying m2, while they ‘really’ meant, and were
understood, as M1:
[6.1] M1(S) M1(A) M1(H) S-int.: M1(H)
H-persp.: M1(S) M1(H)
m2(s) m2(a) m2(h) S-int.: m2(h)

(b) Faked misunderstandings.

These differ from feigned misunderstandings in that S manages to make H un-
derstand her in a way S then pretends not to have intended. Examples are (5),
repeated here, and (9).
(5) S1: Do you know what is nice about you?
H: No.
S2: Too bad, I had hoped that you would be able to tell me.
(9) [Alice and Bill are discussing the earthquake damage in their apartment]
Alice1: You know, what I regret most is the crimson vase we got for a
wedding present.
Bill: Oh, I didn’t notice that this got broken, too.
Alice2: It didn’t, and that’s what I regret.

Unlike the above examples of feigned misunderstanding, the speaker here presents
a different analysis of her own previous utterances: Alice2 construes her own pre-
vious utterance, Alice1, in a way it has not been understood before. Similarly, in (5)
S2 makes it appear that S1 should be understood in a way that differs from what the
analyst, and most probably H, too, understood.
 The structure of misunderstandings 579

The following formalization pertains to the first turn (i.e., S1 in (5) and Alice1
in (9)). The first line shows what actually occurred, and the line in lower case —
what S2 and Alice2 pretend to have occurred.
[6.2] M1&M2(S) M1(A) M1(H) S-int.: M1(H)
H-persp.: M1(S) M1(H)
m2(s) m2(a) m2(h) S-int.: m2(h)

Such faked misunderstandings lie at the root of a large proportion of humorous

interchanges. They do not even require any interchange: a single turn will do. In
(10), for instance, the effect is achieved by the first part of the utterance being un-
derstood in a way belied in the second part:
(10) [At a friend’s wedding:]
I, too, did not know what is true happiness till I married, and then it was
too late.

8. ‘Non-understanding’

In the literature, a distinction is made between misunderstanding and non-under-

standing. It should be appreciated, however, that this is not a simple dichotomy.
Total absence of understanding is relatively rare; partial understanding seems to
be more usual. It makes perfect sense to state, for instance: “I understand what
you say, but I don’t know what you mean by it”. In actual cases of ‘misunderstand-
ing’ there are only some aspects of the message that the hearer fails to recover
completely, while others may be transmitted intact. In (1), for instance, the hearer
presumably understands that the speaker has a flat tire; what he fails to retrieve is
only the implicature ‘I cannot take you home’. Or suppose you tell me that “He’s
arrived”; I may be at a loss to understand who is meant by “he”, but still understand
that some male person has arrived. In short, when the analysis of a turn contains
M(S) and N(H), as in [1.1] and [1.2], or M1(S) and M2(H), as in [1.4], the hearer
will usually have recovered correctly some aspects of the message and will have
failed to recover others. Instances of ‘non-understanding’, or complete failure to
recover anything, will be those where the hearer fails to hear the utterance cor-
rectly or, due, perhaps, to lack of knowledge of the language, fails to understand
the literal meaning of the speaker’s utterance.
We conclude that there is no need in our system for a theoretical concept
‘non-understanding’. Instead, a full analysis ought to specify which aspect of the
utterance has been misencoded by the speaker or has been incorrectly retrieved
by the hearer.
580 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

In other words, in addition to the structural analysis of misunderstandings

discussed in the preceding sections, we have to specify for each discrepancy in-
volving M and N — e.g., M(S) and N(A) or M(S) and N(H), M(A) and N(H)
— or M1 and M2, where the misunderstanding is located. In the next section we
propose a classification based on the phase in the process of understanding that
has been disrupted or the aspect of the production process that has been affected.
Previous attempts in this direction are those by Falkner (1997) and Dascal (2003:
303–321), but the following proposal departs from theirs in some respects.

9. Misunderstandings — WHAT went wrong?

The English language distinguishes between failures in various processes that may
result in misunderstanding: e.g., between mispronouncing, mishearing, and mis-
interpreting (see Dascal 2003: 293 for a fuller list of terms with ‘mis-’). Grimshaw
(1980) distinguishes between perceptual, linguistic, and pragmatic processes. The
various processes involved in understanding a message correspond to what Dascal
(2003: 304ff) calls ‘layers of significance’. Dascal views these layers as embedded
one within each other, with speech perception forming the innermost layer. In the
following, a list of layers is proposed, at each of which a speaker-caused misunder-
standing or else a hearer-caused misunderstanding may occur.9 The message, M,
that our formulas refer to — in M(S), M(A), and M(H) — includes the totality of
these layers.
1. Speech perception. The hearer must perceive the speech sounds produced by
the speaker. Due to environmental noise, a faulty line in a telephone conversa-
tion, or because he is hard-of hearing, etc., the hearer may mis-hear or fail to
hear the utterance. Similarly, a speaker-induced misunderstanding may result
from the speaker mispronouncing a word (stuttering, committing a Spooner-
ism, etc.). The same applies of course, mutatis mutandis, to written communi-
cation (to the writer and reader, respectively).
2. Decoding of the literal meaning. The hearer makes sense of the perceived speech
sounds by applying the semantic and syntactic rules of the relevant language.
When he deploys the wrong rules — whether due to insufficient knowledge of
the language or due to other factors, like lack of attention — a misunderstanding
may ensue. A speaker-induced misunderstanding may result from the speaker’s
failure to adhere to what Grimshaw (1980) refers to as ‘linguistic rules’.
3. Interpreting. Understanding the meaning of words and analyzing the syntactic
structure are not sufficient for understanding. In the following, we list some
kinds of interpreting that are required if communication is to be considered
successful:
 The structure of misunderstandings 581

a. The meaning of ambiguous or vague words and the meaning of syntac-

tically ambiguous sentences have to be recovered. In Grimshaw’s (1980)
terms, this, too, is a linguistic process; the following are pragmatic ones:
b. The hearer has to determine the illocutionary force of the utterance.
c. The hearer has to understand the ‘point’ of the utterance (Dascal 2003:
308).
d. The hearer has to recover what Falkner (1997: 140–150) calls the intended
‘Modifikatoren’ of the speaker’s utterance. The speaker may have been
ironic, she may have spoken jokingly, metaphorically, or have been paro-
dying or quoting someone; she may have indulged in overstatement or
have been polite. The hearer may then misunderstand her and take her to
have been serious, literal, and so on. Or else, the speaker may have been
serious, literal, and so on, and the hearer may wrongly attribute a different
‘Modifikator’ to her utterance.
 To retrieve this layer, the hearer has to consult the context of the ut-
terance, the ‘common ground’ of the interlocutors, and general world
knowledge, and in attempting to do so he may make mistakes. Speaker-
caused misunderstandings may also originate at this level. For instance,
the speaker may know only one of the meanings of an ambiguous word,
or one of the ways a construction is used, while in the particular context
of her utterance these will normally be construed differently. A type of a
speaker-caused misunderstanding at the interpreting phase is exemplified
by (2) (in Section 2).
4. Retrieving implicatures. This layer concerns implicatures proper — as distinct
from the ‘explicatures’ or ‘implicitures’, as they are called by some writers —
that belong to the previous layer. The hearer may fail to retrieve the implicated
proposition as illustrated in (1), or retrieve the wrong one (or pretend to re-
trieve the wrong one), as in (4) and (8). A speaker-caused misunderstanding
in respect to implicatures occurs when the speaker formulates her utterance
in a way that prevents the intended implicature from getting across. In (9), for
instance she does so purposely.
Let us illustrate layers 1–4 with a short dialogue:
(11) Cyril: Can David have your car tonight?
Bernie: Tha-that’s a problem. The t-t-t-tire has a flat. The other tire too.
Observe, first, that on hearing Bernie’s utterance, Cyril’s comprehension process
may go wrong at any one of the four layers mentioned in the preceding:
Speech perception: Due to Bernie’s faulty enunciation, Cyril may fail to make out
which words have been uttered.
582 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

Decoding the literal meaning: Being British, Cyril may wonder what a “flat” has to
do with cars (the British-English word appropriate here being “puncture”).
Interpreting: It doesn’t take much to realize that the tires Bernie refers to are the
tires of his car. However, there is a, albeit very slight, possibility that Cyril does not
catch on here (perhaps he is inattentive).
Retrieving implicatures: The implicature of Bernie’s utterance is of course: David
cannot have the car. To retrieve this, Cyril has to draw on his general knowledge:
one tire can be replaced by the spare tire, but when two tires are punctured, you
have to take the car to a garage. Cyril’s ignorance in this respect may result in his
failing to draw the implicature.
The types of misunderstanding dealt with so far are those usually discussed in the
literature. But there are other things, too, that the hearer may do with an utterance. If
we regard any disruption of the communication process as a misunderstanding, we
may identify additional types (rarely dealt with, perhaps because less damaging to
the interaction). Let us look now at these additional types of disruption.
5. Appreciating the form of the message. Full comprehension involves not only
identifying the informational content of the message, but also appreciating
the way the message has been phrased: in what language the message is for-
mulated and in what ‘register’, whether the speaker’s diction is clear, or — as
in our example (11) — whether he stutters. Suppose, for instance, the speaker
indulges in rhyming, or makes a pun, and the hearer fails to notice this. Or the
speaker makes her point by using a quote, and the hearer does not appreciate
this fact. Then something gets lost in the interchange even though the message
content may have been fully recovered by the hearer. Conversely, when the
speaker inadvertently makes a rhyme, the hearer may notice what the speaker
did not intend. These, then, would hardly be instances of a perfectly smooth
interaction. The pre-theoretical notion of misunderstanding perhaps does not
include such cases, but for our purposes it is appropriate to stretch the term so
as to include them.
6. Resonating to the message. Frequently, an utterance releases in the hearer some
kind of attitudinal response: he may agree or disagree with what has been
said, be outraged or pacified by it, view the speaker as having been sincere;
fraudulent, impolite, obsequious, and so on. In (11), Cyril may understand the
implicature and react to it emotionally (thinking: ‘The bastard! He drives me
mad.’). When Bernie’s motives were such that they did not merit such resonat-
ing, we have a kind of misunderstanding.
7. Monitoring the discourse. In conversation, utterances often occur whose func-
tion is not to impart information, but to ‘steer’ the discourse: for instance,
 The structure of misunderstandings 583

indications of an intention to intrude (“But…”), or so-called ‘continuers’ (like

“uhuh”). When the hearer fails to ‘understand’ these signals, a misunderstand-
ing, of sorts, has occurred. Further, in regard to a regular, informative utter-
ance, the hearer has to understand its discourse function: is it a reply to a
question — as in (11) — or has the speaker embarked on a new subject, etc.
8. Inferring: Hearers make inferences from messages, and these may diverge from
those intended by the speaker. Sherlock Holmes may tell Watson a certain fact,
intending him to draw from it a certain conclusion; if Watson then arrives at
a different conclusion, there has been a disruption of communication; Watson
has misinferred from the detective’s utterance. In (11), Cyril may make the
inference ‘He doesn’t want to let David have the car’, and may be dead-wrong:
Bernie may have loved to lend the car (and perhaps his stutter partly reflects
his intention to have Cyril think that he is embarrassed by his failure to com-
ply). Note that we are talking here only about intended inferences — what the
speaker’s utterance may indicate (using Dascal’s [2003: 39] terminology).
Here is another example:
(12) A1: Hullo, I am calling about your reservation for the flight next Thursday.
B: Oh, did they cancel it? I really can’t afford to put it off much longer.
A2: No, I am calling to remind you that your ticket hasn’t been paid for yet.
(after Falkner 1997)

The opening turn, “I’m calling…” cannot be said to involve an implicature con-
cerning what the call is about; but B mistakenly infers from the fact that the com-
pany calls her that she is going to be told about a cancellation.

10. Summary

Our analyses have shown that misunderstanding is a multifaceted concept. The

conceptual framework proposed in this article comprises several facets of interpre-
tation: the message as understood by the speaker, the hearer, and the analyst, the
speaker’s intention as to how the hearer is to understand the utterance, the hearer’s
perception of the speaker’s intentions, and the way an interlocutor pretends the
message to have been understood by herself or her addressee. These constructs
afford a classification system for misunderstandings. A proposed orthogonal clas-
sification is based on the layer of significance that fails to be communicated cor-
rectly. The analyses presented here involve viewing ‘misunderstanding’ as a theo-
retical concept that diverges somewhat from that denoted by the pre-theoretical
term ‘misunderstanding’, as it is generally understood.
584 Izchak M. Schlesinger and Sharon Hurvitz

Notes

*  Thanks are due to Moshe Anisfeld, Marcelo Dascal, Anita Mittwoch, and three anonymous
reviewers for very helpful comments.

1.  These examples illustrate that a misunderstanding may become apparent only in a subse-
quent turn.

2.  Cf. the notion of a neutral observer in controversies envisaged by Leibniz (Dascal
2003: 281).

3.  The three concepts M(S), M(H), and M(A) have a parallel in three approaches to the inter-
pretation of literary texts. One school holds that the meaning of a text lies in what the author
intended it to be, whereas according to a different, more modern view, it is the reader, rather
than the author, who creates meaning. But scholars of the New Criticism school hold (to put it
in a simplified form) that the meaning resides in the text, and not in the author’s intention or
the way the reader reads it.

4.  Some writers, though, would reserve the term ‘misunderstanding’ for the latter. Dascal (2003:
294) states that they are a “communicative phenomenon typically belonging to reception” (em-
phasis added). As will be seen in the following, one and the same conceptual apparatus permits
the classification of speaker-caused as well as hearer-caused misunderstandings, and we propose
therefore that the theoretical concept of misunderstanding should include both.

5.  As are misunderstandings where the two errors cancel each other out, so that N2(H) in the
above formula is replaced by M(H).

6.  This and other examples which are quoted in the present paper from Falkner (1997) are real-
life examples.

7.  Normally, M1 and M2 will not be equally salient: There is a gradient from a totally unaccept-
able interpretation (taking context into account) and a totally acceptable one.

8.  This, rather than M(S), is the concept of intention that figures in Grice’s (1969) definition of
non-natural meaning. Observe also that our M(A) has no parallel in Grice’s system: what Grice
(1968) calls “applied timeless meaning of an utterance type” does not include the implicatures
which an ‘analyst’ retrieves from the utterance. Further, since he is not concerned with misun-
derstandings, Grice has no need for M(H).

9.  A caveat is in order here. No claim is being made concerning the sequence of the procedures
in the comprehension process. This is a psychological issue that does not concern us here.

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Authors’ addresses
Izchak M. Schlesinger Sharon Hurvitz
Department of Psychology Department of English
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem 91905 Jerusalem 91905
Israel Israel
msizchak@mscc.huji.ac.il shurvitz@mscc.huji.ac.il

About the authors

Izchak M. Schlesinger is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at The Hebrew University of Jerusa-
lem and first incumbent of the Joseph H. and Belle Braun Chair in Psychology. He is the author
of several books — among them: Cognitive Space and Linguistic Case (1995) and The Structure
of Arguments (with T. Keren Portnoy and T. Parush, 2001).
Sharon Hurvitz received her Master’s degree in English linguistics at the English Department
of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2005, and was awarded the Dean’s grant in 2006. She
is now working on her PhD at the same department, where she has also been teaching for the
past few years.