Verbal Interaction with Misunderstanding : An Empirical Study of German Discussion Groups

This study examines the functions of phrases with the word missverstehen in any inflected form in German discussion groups. The corpus consists of about 600 different messages with a phrase containing the verb missverstehen from all kinds of discussion groups speaking the German language. The hypothesis is that those phrases do not always refer to a factual misunderstanding in the communication. There is no such thing as total understanding in communication, since people cannot fully know how other people are thinking. Instead understanding is a social construct. Misunderstanding occurs when a group member cannot interpret a message so that it correlates with what the sender has meant. This understanding contains both the discussed theme as well as the relation between the group members. Relevance occurs when interpretable information is communicated through contextualization cues. Some cues carry information about the discussed theme, others communicate face work. A misunderstanding is caused by missing contextualization cues, i. e. the message is irrelevant. The study shows how the communicators can construct a disagreement as a misunderstanding, which it in turn has an impact on face work. The phrase is then being used together with added contextualization cues in order to construct a common understanding. Thereby the communicators can influence the interaction. This is done in a sequence in the discussion group. Hence the script theory (Schank/Abelson 1977) aims to describe the phenomenon of how a phrase with the word missverstehen can be used for different purposes. One script is defined for each purpose. The difference between the scripts is being maintained by the contextualization cue that carries the information about how the relations between group members are interacted.