ArticlePDF Available

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings

August 2018
Pragmatics and Cognition 24(2):263–296

DOI:10.1075/pc.17034.mac

Authors:

University of Lisbon

The detection and analysis of misunderstandings are crucial aspects of discourse analysis, and presuppose a twofold investigation of their structure. First, misunderstandings need to be identified and, more importantly, justified. For this reason, a classification of the types and force of evidence of a misunderstanding is needed. Second, misunderstandings reveal differences in the inter-locutors' interpretations of an utterance, which can be examined by considering the presumptions that they use in their interpretation. This paper proposes a functional approach to misunderstandings grounded on presumptive reasoning and types of presumptions, in which incompatible interpretations or interpre-tative failures are examined as defaults of the underlying interpretative reasoning , caused by overlooked evidence or conflicting presumptions. Moreover, it advances a classification of the types and the probative weights of the evidence that can be used to detect misunderstandings. The proposed methodology and its implications are illustrated through the analysis of doctor-patient communication in diabetes care.

Misunderstanding, nonunderstanding, and communicative effects

…

Levels of presumptions

…

Classification of the evidence of misunderstanding

…

Presumptive reasoning

…

Figures - uploaded by Fabrizio Macagno

Content may be subject to copyright.

Content uploaded by Fabrizio Macagno

Content may be subject to copyright.

John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from Pragmatics & Cognition 24:2

This electronic file may not be altered in any way.

The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed

copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only.

Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is

accessible only to members (students and faculty) of the author's/s' institute. It is not

permitted to post this PDF on the internet, or to share it on sites such as Mendeley,

ResearchGate, Academia.edu.

Please see our rights policy on https://benjamins.com/content/customers/rights

For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the

publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com).

Please contact rights@benjamins.nl or consult our website: www.benjamins.com

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing

and detecting misunderstandings

Fabrizio Macagno

IFILNOVA, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas,

Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa

e detection and analysis of misunderstandings are crucial aspects of dis-

course analysis, and presuppose a twofold investigation of their structure. First,

misunderstandings need to be identied and, more importantly, justied. For

this reason, a classication of the types and force of evidence of a misunder-

standing is needed. Second, misunderstandings reveal dierences in the inter-

locutors’ interpretations of an utterance, which can be examined by considering

the presumptions that they use in their interpretation. is paper proposes a

functional approach to misunderstandings grounded on presumptive reasoning

and types of presumptions, in which incompatible interpretations or interpre-

tative failures are examined as defaults of the underlying interpretative reason-

ing, caused by overlooked evidence or conicting presumptions. Moreover, it

advances a classication of the types and the probative weights of the evidence

that can be used to detect misunderstandings. e proposed methodology and

its implications are illustrated through the analysis of doctor–patient communi-

cation in diabetes care.

Keywords: misunderstanding, interpretation, pragmatics, presumption,

intercultural communication, intra-cultural communication, interpretative

reasoning

. Introduction

Misunderstanding is a crucial issue for any discipline focusing on the analysis of

discourse or conversation (Tzanne 2000). On the one hand, it presupposes a frame-

work for representing the mismatching interpretations of an utterance (Weigand

1999, Yus 1999, Moeschler 2007, Kecskes 2013: 59–60). On the other hand, the no-

tion of misunderstanding is commonly used but hardly inquired into either in prag-

matics (Verdonik 2010: 1364) or in cross-cultural studies, including intercultural

https://doi.org/./pc..mac

Pragmatics & Cognition : (), –

 - / - - © John Benjamins Publishing Company

 Fabrizio Macagno

communication and pragmatics (Moeschler 2004, Moeschler 2007, Kaur 2011),

and intra-cultural communication among dierent communities (Macagno &

Bigi 2017a). is twofold dimension corresponds to the interrelated problems of

identifying a misunderstanding and analyzing its causes, unveiling the possible

dierences or similarities between the interlocutors’ backgrounds.

e goal of this paper is to propose an analysis of misunderstandings that facili-

tates an explanation of why a turn in a conversation can reveal the occurrence of a

misunderstanding, and at the same time identifying the possible cause(s) thereof.

More precisely, this paper will focus on the types of evidence that can support the

conclusion that a participant in a dialogue has reached an interpretation of the

inter locutor’s utterance which is dierent from the intended meaning. is evi-

dence can be stronger or weaker, depending on its nature and whether it is isolated

or corroborated by other evidence. e detection of a misunderstanding leads to its

analysis, namely, the investigation of why it occurred. To this purpose, this paper

will propose a functional (argumentative or justicatory) approach to misunder-

standings, based on the interpretive reasoning and the underlying presumptions

involved in the interpretation of an utterance.

e paper begins by dening the area of study, narrowing the eld of the broad

notion of misunderstanding as dened in the existing literature to a specic phe-

nomenon, which will be referred to as a mismatch between dierent or incompat-

ible interpretations. e cause of this mismatch will be explained by considering

the reasoning involved in the justication of the interpretation of an utterance.

is account will lead to a further level of analysis, consisting of the classication

of the premises used in the interpretative reasoning, referred to as “presumptions”

(Macagno 2017). By classifying such premises, it is possible to bring to light the

dierences between the interlocutors’ ‘common’ grounds, and, more precisely, the

information that is taken as common but in fact may or may not be shared. Finally,

the detection of misunderstandings will be investigated by proposing a classica-

tion based on the types of available evidence that can justify the occurrence of a

misunderstanding. e application of this approach will then be illustrated through

the analysis of specic cases taken from a corpus of doctor–patient communication.

. Dening misunderstanding

Misunderstanding is a controversial notion, as it is essentially related to the problem

of dening what counts as understanding (Weigand 1999: 768). Understanding

can be broadly dened, using the terminology adopted by Dascal and Berenstein

(1987: 140), as the successful retrieval of the pragmatic interpretation of the speak-

er’s utterance:

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

Normally, speech is used to convey one pragmatic interpretation, and success in

communication is measured by the addressee’s ability to reach that interpretation.

is is what is usually subsumed by the term ‘understanding’. Notice that under-

standing is always pragmatic understanding. It is not a matter only of understand-

ing the speaker’s words (determining the ‘sentence meaning’) nor of understanding

these words in their specic reference to the context of utterance (determining the

‘utterance meaning’), but always a matter of getting to the speaker’s intention in

uttering those words in that context (determining the ‘speaker’s meaning’).

e speaker’s meaning, or rather the interpretation of the utterance that the speaker

intends to convey to and be retrieved by the hearer, is not merely the decoding of

the propositional meaning (omas 1983). Instead, the retrieval of the intended

interpretation depends on dierent factors, including the reason for the speaker’s

utterance, the illocutionary force of the utterance, the degree of commitment of the

speaker to what s/he said, and the indirect messages that the utterance may or may

not convey (intentionally) (Dascal 2003: 304).

From a pragmatic perspective, misunderstanding can be dened as a “mis-

match between the speaker’s intended meaning and the hearer’s understanding

of this meaning in the particular context of interaction” (Tzanne 2000: 34). is

denition focuses on one specic phenomenon, referred to in the literature as

“alternative understanding” (Weigand 1999, Yus 1999) or coexistence of “alternate

interpretations” (Gumperz & Tannen 1979: 310). It draws two crucial distinctions.

On the one hand, it separates the cognitive dimension of misunderstanding (com-

prehension) (Weigand 1999: 769) from other perceptual phenomena such as mis-

hearing, non-hearing, misperception, etc. (Zaeerer 1977, Grimshaw 1980). On the

other hand, according to this denition, misunderstandings are dierentiated from

their eects. In this view, misunderstandings can be considered as the (possible)

cause of communicative breakdowns, namely, interruptions in communication that

can result from the disparity between the speaker’s and the hearer’s interpretation

(Milroy 1984: 15).

Misunderstanding needs to be thus distinguished from (a) the phenomena

that prevent understanding (i.e. lead to nonunderstanding) and (b) their eects.

Nonunderstanding is the lack of an interpretative hypothesis, which can result from

both non-cognitive problems (more specically, problems in speech perception or

reception) and language comprehension problems. e non-cognitive phenomena

are factors preventing the message from reaching (optimally) the addressee, which

include, for example, problems with the channel of communication (for instance,

the speaker’s bad pronunciation or strong accent). Language comprehension prob-

lems can be considered to be in between misunderstanding and nonunderstanding.

When a poor command of the language or the specialized language (jargon) pre-

vents a possible, even incomplete, interpretation, it leads to nonunderstanding (Yus

 Fabrizio Macagno

1999: 502), in the sense that it results in total incomprehension (Vendler 1994: 20).

is case needs to be distinguished from the case in which the hearer does not

master the language or the jargon perfectly, or does not know some of the terms

used by the speaker, but can still reach an interpretative hypothesis (Allwood &

Abelar 1984). is interpretation can in fact be a misunderstanding that results

from a partial lack of understanding.

Misunderstandings also need to be distinguished by their eects, which include

both the problems that they cause and the ones that they could cause on commu-

nication. Misunderstandings, and, more specically, misunderstandings that have

not been claried, can result in communication failures, breakdowns, and commu-

nicative problems. Moreover, misunderstandings may have a direct eect on the

hearer, who reaches an interpretation that contradicts the background assumptions

s/he can access. is eect is called puzzled understanding (Yus 1999: 504), and can

lead to possible requests for clarication or breakdowns.

e aforementioned denition and the above dierentiations draw some pos-

sible boundaries to the problematic concept of misunderstanding. An incompati-

bility between the communicated and the inferred meaning (or rather the speaker’s

and the hearer’s interpretation of an utterance) can be due to dierent reasons

(Vendler 1994: 21). e causes include (1) failure to understand enriched, spe-

cic semantic representation of an utterance, and (2) failure to draw the intended

implicit meaning of an utterance (Grimshaw 1980), or to reconstruct its “point”

or “force” (pragmatic failures) (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1986) or “conversational

demand” (Dascal 2003: 306). In the following Figure1 (see also Tzanne 2000: 37),

the aforementioned distinctions are summarized graphically:

Speech

perception

Incorrect reception

Intentional Unintentional

Lack of reception

Communicative

eects

Communication

failure

• Communication

breakdown

Noncomprehension

• Miscommunication

• Misapprehension

• Misinterpretation

• Pragmatic failure

• Incomplete

understanding

• Puzzled

understanding

Nonhearing

Misperception

Mishearing

Misunderstanding

Speech

comprehension

Nonunderstanding

Figure1. Misunderstanding, nonunderstanding, and communicative eects

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

is picture of the eld of misunderstandings can be the starting point for investi-

gating the problem of detecting and explaining misunderstandings.

. Explaining misunderstandings

As mentioned above, misunderstandings are related to the comprehension of an

utterance, either dierent from the intended one, or partial or incomplete. e

analysis of misunderstandings thus presupposes an approach to utterance com-

prehension. For analytical purposes, a fundamental aspect of comprehension is an

explanation of why a specic interpretation has been chosen, and of the reasons why

it should be preferred or excluded. To this purpose, in this paper the occurrence

of misunderstandings will be analyzed at the level of their justication, namely, at

the level of the reasons that can be provided for explaining why an utterance was

misunderstood (and, from a practical perspective, for showing how to avoid this

type of misunderstanding in the future). is justicatory level will also be referred

to as “functional” or “argumentative” (Macagno 2017).

e explanation of a misunderstanding can be regarded from a functional

(argumentative) perspective as the reasons that can be provided in favor of two

conicting interpretations of an utterance. In this meta-dialogical process, the

factors that can contribute to comprehending an utterance and that the speaker

needs to take into account in accommodating his/her speech to the recipient (“re-

cipient design”), and that are responsible for miscommunication (Mustajoki 2008,

Mustajoki 2012: 230) are translated into reasons that can justify it. According to

Hamblin (1970: 290–291, Macagno 2011), discourse can be seen as grounded in

various types of presumptions concerning the interlocutors’ expectations (Hamblin

1970: 294–295). Such expectations can concern meaning consistency– relative to

a group of speakers or a previous discourse– or other elements contributing to

comprehension. For instance, an interpretation can be explained based on a gen-

eral presumption such as “Speakers usually use their words in compliance with their

common use”, or a more specic one such as “Speakers usually utter (lexical item,

phrase, or sentence) p to achieve the communicative goal G” (Kecskes 2013: 141,

italics added).

Building on this approach, both the cognitive mechanisms that can be respon-

sible for comprehension and recipient design, and the “egocentric behavior of the

speaker” (Mustajoki 2012, Kecskes 2010a) underlying many cases of misunder-

standing can be conceived and assessed in terms of inferences and presumptive

premises on which an interpretative conclusion is based. e expectations about

compliance with language and text or discourse organization conventions, about

the discourse participants and their goals (van Dijk & Kintsch 1983: 373), the

 Fabrizio Macagno

situation, or the schemata (Schmid 2003: 5) (commonly referred to as knowledge,

Sayer 2013) are regarded as presumptions, namely, defeasible premises that can lead

to tentative interpretative conclusions when combined with textual or contextual

evidence. Rescher (2006: 33) represented the structure of this type of inference as

follows (Table1), which will be referred to as presumptive reasoning:

Table1. Presumptive reasoning

Premise 1 P (the proposition representing the presumption) obtains whenever the

condition C obtains unless and until the standard default proviso D (to the

eect that countervailing evidence is at hand) obtains (Rule).

Premise 2 Condition C obtains (Fact).

Premise 3 Proviso D does not obtain (Exception).

Conclusion P obtains.

e dierent types of presumptive premises can be divided into four categories

according to their content. e rst type (Level 0– pragmatic presumptions) refers

to the presumptions of use, namely, the common associations between the use

of lexical items, phrases, or utterances and a communicative purpose (Kecskes

2008, Kecskes & Zhang 2009, Kissine 2012), or between the dialogical situation

and the expected contribution. is broad category includes both socially (cultur-

ally) shared uses (Can you pass me the salt? is normally used to gently request the

salt) and individual (prior) uses or expected dialogical goals pursued by a specic

interlocutor in a specic setting (Sayer 2013: 745).

e second type (Level 1– linguistic) includes presumptions related to the use

of linguistic (or rather semantic-ontological) items and structures (called semantic

presumptions). For instance, dictionary or shared meanings of lexical items are pre-

sumed to be known and chosen rst by the speakers of a language for want of other

contradicting information (usually soldier means ‘a member of the army’). ese

presumptions represent the presumptive meaning of linguistic elements (Hamblin

1970: 287, Macagno 2011), which, however, are subject to default in case the context

requires a dierent interpretation (Giora etal. 2017). e third level of presump-

tions (Level 2– factual, encyclopedic) concern encyclopedic knowledge, such as the

shared knowledge of facts, common connection between events, or behaviors and

habits. Finally, the last kind of presumptions (Level 3– values and interests) includes

presumptions about the interlocutor’s possible hierarchies of values and criteria of

evaluation and choice in a given context (Dewey 1938: 167–168).

ese types of presumptions can have dierent levels of specicity, namely, they

can be more general or more specic (Schank & Abelson 1977: 37). ey include

the expectations about the interlocutor that result from the fact that s/he is a human

being, or a member of a broader community (such as a linguistic community), or

of a specic culture or sub-culture (Kecskes 2015) (for example, ‘recommendation

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

letters usually mention only the outstanding qualities of a candidate’), or the inter-

locutor as a specic individual (for instance, ‘this professor usually writes very few

and short recommendation letters’). e specicity of a presumption is a crucial

factor for assessing the presumptive reasoning underlying an interpretation. More

specic presumptions are the ones more related to the communicative context, and

thus less defeasible by contrary evidence or presumptions (Clark & Brennan 1991,

Clark 1996: Chapter4). However, an incorrect assessment of the interlocutor’s be-

longing to a specic group or community can result in a defaulted presumption, and

thus potential misunderstanding. e levels of presumptions can be represented as

in Figure2 below (Macagno 2017):

Levels of presumptions

0. Pragmatic

1. Linguistic

2. Factual, encyclopedic

3. Values, interests

Use-Act; Type of dialogue-type of move

(ex. Assertive sentences are usually used to inform the

hearer; in eristic dialogues interlocutors are expected

to vent emotions).

Denitions, syntactic structures

(ex. ‘Man’ is usually used to mean a ‘rational

animal’).

Facts, events, stereotypes

(ex. People usually know that France is not a

monarchy now).

e interlocutor’s interests/values…

(ex. Professor x is usually very critical and writes no

recommendation letters; x is usually against the

freedom of press…).

Figure2. Levels of presumptions

An interpretation can be reached presumptively or through a more systematic type

of reasoning, consisting of the assessment of the available evidence and related

presumptions (Chaiken & Trope 1999, Uleman 1999, Uleman, Saribay & Gonzalez

2008, Evans 2003), which Atlas and Levinson (1981) described as reasoning from

the best interpretation. When a presumptive interpretation is challenged, or when

the presumptive interpretation cannot be maintained in consideration of conicting

evidence, the interpreter can reach (and justify) his/her interpretative conclusion

by taking into account the most likely interpretations and excluding the weakest

ones (Walton 2002, Wyner & Bench-Capon 2007, Bench-Capon & Prakken 2010,

Macagno 2011, Weinstock, Goodenough & Klein 2013). is type of interpretative

reasoning can be represented according to the following scheme (Table2) (adapted

from Walton etal. 2008: 329):

 Fabrizio Macagno

Table2. Reasoning from best interpretation

Premise 1 U (an utterance) is an observed communicative act.

Premise 2 I (Interpretation 1) is a satisfactory description of the meaning of U.

Premise 3 No alternative meaning description I’ (such as interpretation 2) given so far

is as satisfactory as I.

Conclusion erefore, I is a plausible hypothesis, based on what is known so far.

e two patterns of reasoning, together with the distinct types and levels of pre-

sumptions, constitute possible means for representing the justication of an inter-

pretation, and the interlocutors’ reasoning intended to bridge the gap between their

individual (and cultural) knowledge. By pointing out the presumptions the speaker

relies on and the misunderstandings resulting from his/her utterance, it is possible

to assess in terms of problematic reasoning the speaker’s (or hearer’s) eorts to

adapt communication to the interlocutor’s possible knowledge and expectations.

is approach can explain from a logical perspective how the participants in a

dialogue can advance an educated guess about the other’s mind, and why and how

the “recipient design” can go wrong (Mustajoki 2012: 228). By providing a structure

for justifying an interpretation, presumptions can be used for representing mental

and interpretative processing at a justicatory level.

. Misunderstandings as problematic presumptive reasoning

As mentioned above, a misunderstanding can be analyzed as a conict of pre-

sumptions that can occur at different levels of an interpretative reasoning.

Misunderstandings can be explained in terms of presumptive reasoning: the speaker

and the hearer interpret the same utterance based on dierent presumptions or on

presumptions weighted and assessed dierently based on the available evidence.

For this reason, the mismatch is at the level of the interpretative presumptive rea-

soning. On the one hand, the speaker may incorrectly presume that the hearer can

reach an interpretation, or that the intended interpretation is the most likely in the

given context. On the other hand, the hearer may incorrectly assess the presump-

tions based on the available evidence. Determining the conicts of presumptions

or the contextual or linguistic evidence that has not been considered in making an

utterance, or interpreting it, can help determine why a misunderstanding occurred,

and how it can be avoided. More specically, presumptions allow for analysis of

misunderstandings at the level of the possible evidence that has been disregarded

or that should have been provided.

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

. Defaulting presumptions

A rst type of misunderstanding results from defaulted presumptions. As described

above, presumptions can be subject to default because the proviso on which they are

based obtains. e clearest case of defaulted presumptions in interpretation concern

linguistic presumptions, namely, rules and conventions of use that are presumed to

be shared by interlocutors belonging to the same speech community. An example

is the following exchange between a native speaker of English and a foreign student

(Romero-Trillo & Lenn 2011: 236):

(1) A: And we were able to talk about Christmas Carols and Caroling and vocab-

ulary and–

B: And who?

A: Caroling– it’s the verb, for Christmas Carol… you can make a verb, like

singing, but singing carols. It’s called Caroling.

is misunderstanding is due to the partial lack of understanding of the semantic

representation of the utterance (Schlesinger & Hurvitz 2008: 580–581). B does

not know the term caroling and takes it for a proper name. In this case, the hear-

er’s decoding of the utterance (Recanati 2002) is problematic because of a partial

lack of linguistic competence, which is presumed by A. B can reach a semantic

representation of the utterance, but it is incomplete and unspecic, as s/he can-

not assign the referent to the linguistic item that s/he decodes as a proper name.

is misunderstanding (also called linguistic misunderstanding, Humphreys-Jones

1986: 27) does not result in alternative interpretations at other levels, as B cannot

provide a specic semantic representation. A fails to take into account the likeli-

hood of the proviso underlying the use of caroling, namely, that the meaning of

uncommon, infrequently used or non-ordinary words is not commonly shared

by non-native speakers.

A potential misunderstanding can be also the result of the choice of a defaulted

presumption by the hearer. We consider the following example (Dascal 2003: 308),

in which the presumptive interpretation of A’s utterance is refused by B:

(2) A: Can you pass the salt?

B: Yes, I can. (No action performed)

A’s utterance is normally interpreted as a polite request, as “the link between the

‘Can you___?’ construction and the directive interpretation is highly convention-

alised and largely automatic” (Kissine 2012: 180; for a discussion of a similar case

in intercultural communication, see Kecskes 2013: 117). However, B intentionally

refuses this interpretation, opting for the ordinary interpretative matching between

 Fabrizio Macagno

force and sentence type (interrogative sentence– question). is alternative inter-

pretation is also presumptive, but subject to default in the specic context in which

B’s ability to pass the salt is not controversial. e refusal of the only acceptable

presumptive interpretation (gentle request) leads to an interpretative process aimed

at explaining the purpose of B’s intended alternative interpretation (B wants to

communicate his/her refusal to perform the action, or a protest against A’s requests,

or a joke, etc.).

. Conicting presumptions and lack of evidence

A distinct type of misunderstanding is the result of conicting presumptions, both

acceptable in a given context. A clear example is the one below (omas 1983: 93):

(3) A: (to fellow passenger on a long-distance coach) Ask the driver what time

we get to Birmingham.

B: (to driver) Could you tell me when we get to Birmingham, please?

Driver: Don’t worry, love, it’s a big place– I don’t think it’s possible to miss it!

In this case, the interlocutors obtain dierent semantic representations of the utter-

ance based on two alternative patterns of presumptive reasoning, both acceptable.

e driver reasons from the premise that the phrase when <the bus gets> is com-

monly used to refer to the moment in which the bus arrives at a place, while the

passenger grounds his/her interpretation on the presumption that ‘when we get to is

commonly used for indicating the time of arrival’. e problem with the passenger’s

request is that s/he does not take into consideration the other presumptive inter-

pretation available in the specic context, and fails to provide enough evidence for

determining the intended meaning. e choice of an interpretation of when is also

aected by distinct pragmatic presumptions concerning the conversational demand

(Dascal 2003: 306) of B’s utterance (‘Tell us at what time we get to Birmingham’ vs.

‘Alert us just aer we get to Birmingham’). e driver interprets the utterance based

on the presumption that usually passengers request the driver to alert them of the

wanted stop, while the passenger interprets it based on the presumptive association

between syntactical form and purpose (information-seeking request).

e mismatching enrichments or specications of the semantic representa-

tion of an utterance (or, within the Relevance eory framework, the explicatures,

Sperber & Wilson 1995: 179–180) can be the result of presumptions that are as-

sessed dierently by the interlocutors in a given context. For instance, we consider

the following case (Bazzanella & Damiano 1999: 825):

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

(4) A. Good morning. I need a book on English for the rst course of the American

school.

A. e leaet they gave me. ey say there’s a 4 discount of as much as ten

per cent?

B. If you have your enrollment yes.

A. Yes yes, I’m already enrolled.

B. Yes no, but if you have the enrollment coupon with you.

A. Oh, I understand. [laughs]

In this conversation, the misunderstanding is caused by the disambiguation of

the term enrollment. e student intends it in a broader sense (‘to be enrolled in

a course’), while the bookseller in a narrow sense (‘enrollment coupon’). e rst

interpretation is drawn by relying on the specication of the meaning of the term

in a stereotypical context, the second from the additional presumption, resulting

from the specic context of selling academic books (Kecskes 2008, Kecskes & Zhang

2009, Kecskes 2013: 129, 131), that evidence (in this case of enrollment) needs to

be provided in order to get a discount. e bookseller, unlike the student, takes

into account this latter presumption and disambiguates enrollment as ‘enrollment

coupon’. e student, unfamiliar with the practice of discounts, fails to consider this

aspect of contextual evidence and the related presumption, and reaches a distinct

interpretation.

Conicts of equally acceptable presumptions can result in misunderstand-

ings at the level of the interpretation of communicative purpose of the utterance

(its force or its implicatures). A clear example is the following (quoted in Kissine

2012: 169), in which the two interlocutors act based on incompatible presumptive

interpretations of A’s utterance force:

(5) A gleam pushed through the sleepiness in his grey eyes, and he sat up a little in

his chair, asking:

A: Leggett’s been up to something?

B: Why did you say that?

A: I didn’t say it. I asked it.

A’s utterance force can be ambiguous, as it can normally be interpreted both as

an assertion and as a question. A relies on the presumptive association between

sentence type and force, B on the presumptive interpretation of the type of the

syntactic construction.

 Fabrizio Macagno

. Conicting presumptions and overlooked evidence

A misunderstanding can occur because of conicting but not equivalent presump-

tions in a given context. In this case, one of the two mismatching interpretations

is weaker because it is defaulted by evidence that can be available, or weakened by

other conicting presumptions. An example of the rst circumstance is provided

by omas (1983: 93):

(6) A: Is this coee sugared? (aer tasting it)

B: I don’t think so. Does it taste as if it is?

In this conversation, B (the husband) brought the coee to the wife (A), who tastes

it. A’s utterance can be interpreted presumptively as aimed at requesting informa-

tion; however, this interpretation can be subject to default if the contextual evidence

(presumably available also to B) that A has tasted the coee is taken into account. In

this case, it is possible to notice dierent types of interpretative reasoning involved

in the conicting interpretations. e wife’s interpretation is grounded on a com-

plex interpretative reasoning in which several presumptions are involved (‘asking

whether the coee is sugared is pointless if it is possible to taste it’; ‘normally B

brings non-sugared coee’; then A probably knows that the coee is not sugared

and intends to remind B of his failure to complete his tasks, i.e. to complain about

it). e husband, however, overlooks the evidence and opts for the presumptive

association between syntactic structure and illocutionary force.

An interpretation can be weakened by a conicting presumption. An example

is the following (Dascal 2003: 49):

(7) (Priest, visiting a convicted burglar in jail)

A: Why did you rob the bank, my son?

B: ‘cause there is where the real dough is

is case is characterized by a misunderstanding at the level of the semantic rep-

resentation, concerning the topic-focus structure (namely, on whether the focus is

on the bank or on the whole sentence). However, in addition to this level of misun-

derstanding, we can detect a dierent interpretation of the purpose of the utterance.

Even though the interlocutors interpret it as the same generic illocutionary act

of requesting, they draw dierent inferences concerning its conversational goal,

namely, the eect it is intended to have on the conversation. e priest’s interpre-

tation is based on the presumption that a priest visiting a convict is not seeking

information on the details of the crime, but rather on the moral motivations behind

it. e burglar overlooks the specic characteristics of this activity and interprets

the utterance as an ordinary information-seeking request.

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

Another case of misunderstanding that can be reconstructed in terms of over-

looking weakening presumptions is the following (Gumperz 1982: 135):

(8) A mother is talking to her eleven-year-old son, who is about to go out in the rain:

Mother: Where are your boots?

Son: In the closet.

Mother: I want you to put them on right now (told with an upset tone of voice)

e son interprets his mother’s utterance as a request for information based on

the pragmatic presumption linking interrogative sentences with requests for infor-

mation. However, the mother takes this presumption as excluded by a conicting

presumption (she is presumed to know where her son’s boots are), thus leaving a

more complex inference as the only acceptable one (an order inferred from: 1. e

mother is presumed to know where the son’s boots are; 2. Whoever goes out in the

rain usually wears boots; 3. e son has no boots; 4. e mother usually tells the

son how to dress).

. Conicting and equivalent presumptions

A conict of interpretations can be the result of conicting presumptions that, in

the given context, are equivalent. For this reason, the misunderstanding can be con-

sidered as caused by the speaker’s overlooking of other conicting presumptions,

and his/her failure to exclude them by providing additional evidence. An example

is the following (Dascal 2003: 310):

(9) At the swimming pool, lunch is served; A and B have just met for the rst time

A: Doesn’t this grapefruit taste stale? I bet you it’s canned.

B: Grapefruits grow all around us. Why should they use canned juice when

fresh fruit is available?

A: Oh, well, I guess I just don’t care for juice today.

A’s utterance cannot be presumptively taken as a genuine request for an opinion

concerning the taste of the grapefruit, as it provides an explanation for its poor a-

vor. For this reason, it can be interpreted as a complaint about the quality of the food

(or the fruit, or the service in general), as an invitation to have a conversation, etc.

A probably intended the utterance as a complaint, but B drew dierent inferences

and took into account the relationship between canned food and taste, concluding

that the utterance was a complaint about serving canned fruit. Both interpretations

are possible and equivalent, as both are not contradicted or weakened by other

presumptions or contextual evidence.

 Fabrizio Macagno

. Presumptions and intercultural communication

As mentioned in the section above, the acceptability of dierent interpretations of

the same utterance can vary according to the strength and acceptability of the pre-

sumptions they rely on. An interpretation that takes into account all the evidence

provided by the context will be less defeasible than a more generic presumption,

and for this reason preferable (Macagno & Walton 2017: Chapter3). However,

presumptions can vary depending on the speech, culture, community, or activity

of the interlocutors (Kecskes 2010b: 2895). e belonging of the interlocutor to

a specic speech community or his/her engaging in a specic culturally dened

activity (an activity type, see Levinson 1992, Gumperz & Tannen 1979) is a ground

for presuming that specic contexts (or default interpretations) are shared (Clark

1996: 96, Brennan & Clark 1996: 1484). For this reason, dierences in interpret-

ation are aected by dierences in considering specic presumptive interpretations

as shared and accessible by the interlocutor (Giora etal. 2017). Misunderstandings

can occur because, depending on the interlocutors’ cultures or communities, dif-

ferent presumptions are available.

e rst cause of mismatch between two presumptive interpretations can be the

dierence between cultures. For instance, we consider the following case (Gumperz

1982: 135):

(10) Husband: Do you know where today’s paper is?

Wife: I’ll get it for you.

Husband: at’s O.K. Just tell me where it is. I’ll get it.

Wife: No, I’LL get it.

Here the conversational purpose of the husband’s utterance is interpreted by the

wife as a request for action, while the husband intended it as a request for in-

formation. Both interpretations are conventionalized, as Gumperz points out, in

two distinct cultures (the American– the husband– and the British– the wife).

e existence of dierent cultural presumptive interpretations (and thus possible

misunderstandings) can be used to check the interlocutor’s belonging to a specic

community, as Gumperz (1982: 133) notices.

The second type of conflict between two presumptive interpretations re-

sults from intra-cultural dierences. A clear example is the following (Gumperz

1982: 133):

(11) (e graduate student has been sent to interview a black housewife in a low

income, inner-city neighborhood. e contact has been made over the phone

by someone in the oce. e student arrives, rings the bell, and is met by the

husband, who opens the door, smiles, and steps towards him)

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

Husband: So y’re gonna check out ma ol lady, hah?

Interviewer: Ah, no. I only came to get some information. ey called from

the oce.

(Husband, dropping his smile, disappears without a word and calls his wife)

In the black community, the husband’s utterance is presumptively interpreted (as

Gumperz underscores) as aimed at building or checking the rapport between the

interlocutors. However, this specic presumption of use, shared within the black

community, is not available to the interviewer, who interprets the utterance con-

sidering a dierent presumption (‘A question on what the interlocutor intends to

do is usually aimed at requesting information’).

is type of conict between prior contexts can be also more complex, involv-

ing a misunderstanding both at the level of the semantic representation and the

purpose of the utterance. An example is given by Gumperz (1982: 196):

(12) e sermon was recorded from a radio broadcast of a service held in a San

Francisco Bay Area church and is typical of a type of sermon that can be heard

on public radio stations on Sundays. e main speaker is the assistant pastor

of the church, and the congregation whose responses are also recorded is black.

e political address was made during the late 1960s at a San Francisco public

meeting, called to protest against United States policies during the Vietnam war.

e speaker was a well-known, but highly controversial black community leader.

In the course of his talk, which dealt with the American president’s treatment of

ethnic minorities at home and of nonwhite populations abroad, the speaker used

the expression: “We will kill Richard Nixon”.

e utterance was made in a specic context– a protest against ethnic policies–

and led to two distinct interpretations of its meaning and force. e black com-

munity regarded it as a complaint, a hyperbolic expression of annoyance against

the president (interpreting it as ‘we are going to ght against him’ or ‘we are going

to stop him’). e white audience, however, criticized it as a threat (interpreting

it as ‘we are going to assassinate him’), and the pastor was indicted for this. As

Gumperz (1982: 197) highlights, the utterance was interpreted according to two

distinct presumptions. For the black community, to kill is usually used to mean

hyperbolically ‘to stop’ or ‘to nish’. For the generic white community, it is pre-

sumptively interpreted as ‘to cause the death of’. e misunderstanding is not only

at the level of disambiguation, but also at the level of the purpose of the utterance.

e white audience interpreted it presumptively as a threat. e alternative inter-

pretation (a complaint and an expression of distress) can be reached considering

the activity type characterizing the utterance. e utterance was made within a

sermon, and more specically a sermon given against the American policies against

 Fabrizio Macagno

ethnic minorities. In this context, the presumptive interpretation reached by the

white audience could be defaulted by the evidence of the presumptively peaceful

goal of the sermon.

. Evidence of misunderstandings

From a functional, justicatory approach, misunderstandings are analyzed in terms

of problematic interpretative reasoning based on presumptions that are subjected

to default, overweighed by other available stronger presumptions, or that are not

corroborated enough to overcome other possible presumptions. In this view, mis-

understandings include not only conicting interpretations strictu sensu, but also

the conict between an interpretation of an utterance that the speaker presumes

to be inferable by the hearer and the interlocutor’s failure to reach it. At this ana-

lytical level, the examination of the causes of misunderstandings presupposes that

misunderstandings have been detected, and in the case of discourse analysis, that

misunderstandings can be identied and justied. For this reason, the detection and

the explanation of misunderstandings are two strictly interrelated problems to be

addressed from the same perspective. In order to analyze how misunderstandings

can be detected, it is thus necessary to identify and dierentiate between the types

of evidence that can be provided to justify that a misunderstanding has occurred

(the manifestation according to the terminology adopted by Humphreys-Jones

1986: 91). To this purpose, in this section the possible types of evidence of misun-

derstanding that can be found in written (or transcribed) conversations or inter-

actions will be distinguished and classied.

e rst crucial aspect of the evidence that can be found or provided for justify-

ing a misunderstanding is its nature. As Sacks, Scheglo, and Jeerson (1974: 729)

noticed, “it is the parties’ understandings of prior turns’ talk that is relevant to their

construction of next turns”. For this reason, in order to analyze whether a turn was

understood or misunderstood, the more accessible evidence can be found in the

subsequent turns. However, while the interlocutors usually try to repair misunder-

standings in the so-called repair-initiation opportunity space (three turns from (i.e.

including) the trouble-source turn; Scheglo, Jeerson & Sacks 1977: 375, Scheglo

1987: 203), sometimes their detection can be more problematic, and the repair can

occur in much later turns.

e evidence of misunderstandings has the dialogical nature of a turn, which

can be dialogical or meta-dialogical. In the rst case, the speaker engages in the

dialogue by continuing it (either relevantly or irrelevantly). In the second case,

the speaker suspends or interrupts the dialogue (Gumperz & Tannen 1979: 317)

in order to start a dialogue on the interpretation of an utterance, either his own

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

or the interlocutor’s. e two types of turns provide dierent types of evidence of

misunderstanding.

Meta-dialogical evidence of misunderstanding provides explicit and direct

evidence that one of the interlocutors cannot reach a full interpretation of the

utterance, or has detected a dierent interpretation thereof (Clark & Brennan

1991: 223–225). is evidence can be of dierent kinds, namely, either (1) a decla-

ration of lack of understanding, or (2) a declaration of a dierent interpretation or

the mismatch between the speaker’s and the hearer’s interpretation. e expression

of a misunderstanding can be more or less specic, indicating the source of the

misunderstanding– namely, mismatching interpretations at the level of the specic

semantic representation or the purpose of the utterance. Evidence of this type can

include the following (Tzanne 2000: 20):

a. Correction of the specic, enriched semantic representation of the utterance

provided by either the speaker her/himself (‘I don’t mean X, I mean Y’) or the

hearer (‘Oh, you mean Y!’).

b. Clarication of the intended purpose of the utterance (‘I didn’t mean to oend

you, I only asked…’; ‘it was just a request, not…’)

At a meta-dialogical level, indirect evidence of misunderstandings can be pro-

vided by (3) a request for clarication (see the related notion in Humphreys-Jones

1986: 97) or (4) a conrmation check. e strength of the evidence of clarication

requests is weaker than evidence of type 1 or 2, as a request can be made for dier-

ent reasons (to be sure to have correctly understood the utterance, for example).

However, it is a strong sign that the utterance can be or is problematic and its

understanding cannot be taken for granted. e conrmation check (‘Have you

understood?’) is also an anticipation of a misunderstanding, but as a question it

is only weak and indirect evidence of the expression of misunderstanding by the

hearer (the speaker can ask it for dierent reasons). A positive reply to conrmation

checks does not exclude misunderstandings (the hearer can reply positively only

for continuing the conversation). A negative reply, in contrast, would fall under

category 1 or 2.

A distinct type of evidence is dialogical indirect evidence (Mauranen 2006: 132–

135), namely, dialogical signs that the hearer is acting based on an interpretation

of the speaker’s utterance which is dierent from his/her own. More precisely, the

hearer is not meeting the conversational demand advanced by the speaker with his/

her utterance (Dascal 2003: 306). Indirect evidence (Clark & Brennan 1991: 223–

225; see the related notion of pragmatic inappropriacy in Humphreys-Jones

1986: 100) can result from either (5) irrelevance or (6) lack of uptake. Irrelevance

refers to a turn that is incoherent either pragmatically (for example, a request for

 Fabrizio Macagno

information followed by an acknowledgment, or the repetition of the speaker’s

previous utterance aer the hearer’s turn) or topically (change of subject) (Scheglo

1987, Walton & Macagno 2016, Macagno 2018). Depending on the type of dialogue

and the activity type, the evidential strength of such indirect signs can be higher or

lower (change of topic or dialogue are common in medical interviews, but less com-

mon in cross-examinations). Similarly, repetitions can be due to problems with the

channel, or other disturbances. e sixth type of evidence is lack of uptake, which

includes, for instance, failure to reply to a question or continue the dialogue. e

strength of this type of evidence is lower than the previous one, and it also depends

on the expectations characterizing both the activity type (ordinary conversation

vs. legal dialogues) and the type of communicative purpose pursued (a request for

information vs. a comment).

ese types of evidence can be summarized in the following Figure3, which dis-

tinguishes the types of evidence (direct vs. indirect; dialogical vs. meta-dialogical)

and its strength (dark grey boxes for stronger evidence; grey boxes with dotted pat-

tern for acceptable evidence; light grey boxes with dotted line for weak evidence).

Declaration of lack

of understanding

Mismatching

semantic

interpretation:

• Specication of

lexical meaning

• Reference

assignment

Mismatching

pragmatic

interpretation:

• Conversational

purpose

• Intend ed

inferences

Irrelevant/

incoherent turn

No uptak e

Check of

understanding

Request of

clarication

Meta-dialogical

indirect evidence

Evidence of

problematic

understanding

Correcting alternative

interpretation

Evidence of doubtful

understanding

Lack of coherence

(relevant to the discourse)

1 2

Dialogical indirect

evidence

Meta-dialogical

direct evidence

Figure3. Classication of the evidence of misunderstanding

is distinction allows the analyst to distinguish between actual and possible mis-

understandings (Tzanne 2000: 35). In the rst case, the evidence is strong and

hardly defeasible. In the second case, it can be stronger or weaker, and the specic

circumstances need to be assessed in order to determine whether a misunder-

standing has occurred. Clearly, evidence can combine and result in higher pro-

bative weight (Walton & Reed 2008). For example, irrelevance (5) (such as a turn

incoherent with the pragmatic purpose of the previous turn) can be followed by a

request for clarication (3), or a repetition of the previous turn (5). e combined

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

pieces of evidence support more strongly the conclusion that a misunderstanding

has occurred than the individually considered evidence does.

e evidence of misunderstanding needs to be distinguished from evidence

of non-presumability of an interpretation, namely, the clarication of an utterance

provided directly by the speaker. In this case, the clarication shows that the ut-

terance cannot be taken for granted as (univocally) understandable by the hearer,

as a specication of its meaning is provided in advance. is anticipation of a

misunderstanding can be considered only as a sign that the speaker considers his/

her utterance as potentially problematic. A clear example is the following one, in

which a doctor (D) is telling the patient what type of fruit she can carry with her.

(13) D:

esempi-o un altr-o frutt-o comod-o

for

example.. an... other... fruit... comfortable...

signor-a sono le fragol-e

madam.. are the.. strawberry.

‘For example, another comfortable fruit is the strawberry’

(14) D: perché comunque non èda [sbucci-are]

because

anyways not is. to peel-

‘…because you do not need to peel it.’

Here the doctor provides a clarication of the utterance by specifying more clearly

the meaning of comfortable fruit, which can lead to potential misunderstandings.

. Misunderstandings in doctor–patient communication

e evidence of misunderstanding can be used for detecting and justifying the

occurrence of a misunderstanding, which can then be analyzed according to the

underlying presumptions. In order to illustrate the proposed approach, a few ex-

cerpts will be analyzed which have been extracted from an Italian corpus of 52

video recordings of doctor–patient encounters collected at a public diabetes out-

patient clinic in northern Italy between 2012 and 2014 (Bigi 2014a). Chronic care

communication is a specic activity type characterized by an epistemic dierence

between the doctor and the patient (Bigi 2014a, Bigi 2011). From a dialogical point

of view, the doctor is presupposed to have superior knowledge concerning medical

issues and the power to make a decision on behalf of the patient on specic issues,

while the patient has access to his own preferences, conditions, and habits, which

the physician cannot know a priori. One crucial goal of medical interviews is to

bridge the epistemic gap between doctor and patient in order to make a sound

recommendation (Macagno & Bigi 2017b), namely, not only prescribing drugs,

but also agreeing on a course of action that the patient needs to comply with in

order to prevent complications (Bigi 2014a, Wagner etal. 2001). e analysis of

 Fabrizio Macagno

misunderstandings can bring to light crucial aspects of the unshared ground be-

tween the interlocutors. In the following subsections, the various types of strong or

acceptable types of evidence of misunderstanding will be illustrated.

. Meta-dialogical direct evidence

e clearest evidence of a misunderstanding is the meta-dialogical acknowledg-

ment that the interpretation is not correct or that it is problematic (evidence of

type 1). In the following excerpt, the nurse is presuming that the patient knows the

concept of  , which has been previously explained to him.

However, the patient does not manage to gure out what it means to have high levels

of glycated hemoglobin and asks for a clarication:

Case 1: Lack of understanding. Linguistic presumptions

N: Dev’ess-ere proprio::: pre-s-a quest-a decision-e,

shall..3 be- indeed make--.3 this.. decision.

che l’aiut-erà ad abbass-are ulteriormente la::: la

which you help-.3 to lower- further the.. the..

glicata. Che non può ten-er-la così

glycated_hemoglobin which not can..3 keep--it.. so

alt-a, eh

high-. eh

‘We need to make this decision, which is going to help you to lower the:::the

level of the glycated hemoglobin even more. You cannot keep this level so

high, eh.’

P: Cos’ èla glicata?

what be..3 the.. glycated_hemoglobin?

‘What is glycated hemoglobin?’

N: La glicata èquel valore che

the.. glycated_hemoglobin be..3 the.. value. that

mi dice che le su-e glicemi-e, tre

me.. tell.3 that the..   you r.. glycaemia-.  three

mes-i prima di quest-o preliev-o […], sono

month-. before of this-. blood_sample-. […], be..3

stat-e un poch-in -o alt-e rispetto a

be.-. .. a bit--. high-. considering

un-a norm-a.

a-. standard-.

‘e glycated hemoglobin is the value that tells me that your glycaemia three

months before taking this blood sample […], was a bit high considering the

standard.’

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

e patient has some knowledge of the meaning of glycated hemoglobin (it was

explained in previous interviews with another doctor and a nurse), but he cannot

decode the nurse’s utterance perfectly, nor can he reach with certainty a specic

semantic representation (by establishing the specic meaning of lower) or draw

further inferences. e patient understands that a specic blood value is higher,

but he is not certain that his understanding is correct, and so asks for clarication.

In terms of presumption, the doctor is acting based on the linguistic presumption

that the patient shares the meaning and the understanding of the relevant medical

concept, based on the evidence that he has had other interviews related to his con-

dition. is presumption is subject to default, and results in a lack of understanding.

A meta-dialogical comment or request can be caused by a puzzled understand-

ing, namely, an interpretation that the hearer acknowledges to be incorrect or unrea-

sonable. A clear case is the following, in which the nurse reaches an interpretation

that is not acceptable, and points out that the phrase to empty itself is problematic.

Case 2: Lack of understanding. Presumptive meaning of lexical items

P: Poi h-o not-ato che se mangi-o gli

then have-.1 notice. that if eat- .1  the- 

gnocchi, mi si svuot-a in frett-a. A me

gnocchi me. it. empty-.3 in quick-. to me

piacc-iono tant-issimo.

like-.3 much.

‘en I have noticed that if I eat gnocchi, it <the glycated hemoglobin> empties

itself quickly. I love gnocchi very much.’

N: Come si svuot-a in frett-a?

how it. empty-.3 in quick-..?

‘How does it empty itself quickly?’

P: Eh va giù, va giù.

eh go.3. down go.3. down

‘Eh it goes down, goes down.’

e nurse provides two pieces of evidence of her puzzled understanding: she re-

quests a clarication of the utterance (Evidence3) and at the same time expresses

her problematic understanding (Evidence1). e nurse can decode the utterance,

but the semantic representation obtained can be neither accepted nor specied, as

it conicts with her background assumption (the glycated hemoglobin cannot be

lled in or emptied). From the perspective of interpretative reasoning, the patient

is presuming that the meaning of the metaphorical expression (‘decrease in level’)

is shared by the interlocutor. However, this presumption is subject to default, as the

doctor interprets the utterance in a presumptive way.

 Fabrizio Macagno

e second type of meta-dialogical evidence of misunderstanding is the correc-

tion of an alternative interpretation. In the following excerpt, the doctor is talking

about the glycemic controls to a patient already accustomed with this practice,

consisting of random controls before and aer meals. e doctor uses the phrase in

a more reasoned manner to refer to the way the controls need to be made (coupled

controls, before and aer eating), namely, meaning ‘in a more reasoned <from the

point of view of the modality of the control> manner’. However, the patient inter-

prets the phrase as meaning ‘more frequently’, which leads to a correction.

Case 3: Alternative interpretation of the specic semantic representation

D: Però mi serv-irebbe mh::: per cap-ire anche

but me. need..3 mh::: to understand. also

meglio, far-lo un poch-in-o più

good. make.-it... a.. little--. more

ragion-at-o.

reason...

‘But I need mh::: also to better understand, you to make it in a little more

reasoned manner.’

P: Tutt-i i giorn-i?

e v er y.. the.. day. ?

‘Every day?’

D: Ma anche poss-iamo anche divid-er-lo, non

but also can..3 also split.-it... not

far-lo tutt-o il giorn-o, però a coppi-a, nel

do.-it... all-. the.. day. but to pai r.. in..

sens-o, io tipo dov-re-i far-li mh, prima

sense.. kind shall..1 do.-it... mh before

del past-o e dopo il past-o

of.. meal. and aer the.. meal.

‘But also we can also split it, you don’t need to do it all in a day, but do it in

pairs, in the sense that you should do them before a meal and mh, aer a meal.’

is case of misunderstanding can also lead to mismatching interpretations of the

purpose of the utterance. e doctor intended to complain about the incorrect

self-management of the patient, who instead interprets the utterance as a sugges-

tion for modifying the control frequency. At the level of type of reasoning process

involved, the doctor is presuming that the specic meaning of reasoned is shared by

the interlocutor, as if it were conventionalized in both the speaker’s and the hearer’s

communities. is presumption fails, however, as the metaphor is not conventional

in the patient’s community, and the patient reconstructs the metaphorical mean-

ing of reasoned, checking the best possible interpretation available to him. In this

sense, the doctor is not aware that the metaphor cannot be presumed to be shared

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

outside the specic community of practitioners and long-term patients to which

she belongs.

e correction of an alternative interpretation can also be at the level of the

purpose of the utterance. In the following excerpt, the doctor is complaining about

the eating habits of the patient, which make it impossible for the doctor to pre-

scribe a specic drug. e patient, however, interprets the utterance as an apology

on the part of the doctor for not being able to remove a drug from his health-care

program.

Case 4: Alternative interpretation of the purpose of the utterance

D: Siccome lei …adesso per me è dicile di-re

since you …now for me be..3 dicult say. 

deve togli-ere le pasticch-e de-lla ser-a

shall.2. eliminate. the.. pill. of-the.. evening.

perché ci sono ser-e…

because there be..3 evening.…

‘Since you… now it is dicult for me to say that you should eliminate the

evening pills, because there are some evenings…’

P: No no no non me li tolg-a perché a

no no no not me. it... eliminate.3. because to

me non mi dan-no fastidi-o.

me not me. cause..3 inconvenience.

‘No no no, do not eliminate them because they are not bothering me.’

D: No ma non èper quell-o perché c’è la

no but not be..3 for that.. because there be..3 the..

ser-a in cui lei mangi-a un po’ di più e

evening. in which you eat..3 a.. little of more and

la ser-a in cui non mangi-a nulla.

the.. evening. in which not eat..3 nothing

‘No but it is not for that, because there are evenings in which you eat a bit more

and evening in which you do not eat anything.’

e doctor rst refuses the patient’s interpretation, and then provides additional

information to further specify the purpose of his previous utterance. By adding

further information on the patient’s incorrect eating habits and the eects thereof

on planning treatments, the doctor tries to clarify the misunderstood communica-

tive goal. At the level of reasoning processes, the doctor relies on the presumptive

association between the expression of a diculty due to the interlocutor’s behavior

and the interpretation of the utterance as a complaint. In contrast, the patient in-

terprets the utterance only considering the doctor’s expression of a diculty, from

which he draws the further inference that the doctor is apologizing for a decision

that could be unpleasant to the patient.

 Fabrizio Macagno

. Meta-dialogical indirect evidence

Another type of strong evidence of a possible misunderstanding is the clarica-

tion request. e interlocutor asks for a better specication of the meaning of an

utterance, as the specic semantic representation of the utterance can have dier-

ent interpretations. A clarication request is dierent from direct evidence of a

misunderstanding, as it presupposes only the possibility (but it does not explicitly

indicate the existence) of an alternative interpretation. A clear case is provided by

the following excerpt, in which the specic meaning of a lot of fruit is unspecic.

Case 5: Clarication request

W: Frutta può mang-iar-ne? Perché ne mangi-a

fruit .3 can eat.-it. because it. eat..3

parecchi-a eh

a lot.. eh

‘Can he eat fruit? Because he eats a lot of fruit, eh.’

D: Cos’è? Cosa signic-a parecchi-a?

what be..3 what mean..3 a lot..

‘What is it? What does a lot mean?’

W: Frutta, aranci-o …

fruit orange. …

‘Fruit, orange…’

P: Un aranci-o dopo il past-o::: oppure un-a mel-a

an.. orange. aer the.. meal- ::: or an.. apple.

‘An orange aer a meal– or an apple.’

D: Allora l’importante che si-a un solo frutt-o

then the..-important that. be.3 one.. only fruit.

dopo il past-o.

aer the.. meal.

‘en the important thing is that it is only one fruit aer the meal.’

is conversation is characterized by two distinct pieces of evidence of two dis-

tinct misunderstandings. In the second turn, the doctor asks for a clarication

(Evidence3). However, the patient’s wife provides a reply that is incoherent with

the request, as she interprets the doctor’s question as concerning the meaning of

fruit. For this reason, the doctor denies the wife’s interpretation of the semantic

representation of the utterance (Evidence2) and repeats the question by stressing the

phrase for which he requests a clarication (Evidence5). At the level of interpretative

reasoning, the wife is relying on an interpretation that she considers as presumable

within her own community (usually a lot of fruit means one fruit aer each meal),

but that cannot be considered as such within a diabetes care context (in which people

have health problems also because of their eating and overeating habits).

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

. Dialogical indirect evidence

e last category of evidence is dialogical indirect evidence, and more specically an

irrelevant next turn (Evidence5). A clear case is provided by the following excerpt,

in which the patient complains about the eects of the cortisone (turn 2). e nurse,

however, interprets the verb (to swell) as ‘to increase in weight’, not ‘to dilate’, and

continues to praise the patient for her positive self-management.

Case 6: Irrelevance

N: Però di bas-e lei dev-e st-are attento. Non si

however of basis. you shall..3 be. careful not he.

è alz-ato molto con il pes-o, dir-ei.

go_up... much with the.. weight. say. ..1.

Pens-avo peggio invece no, è

think..1. bad instead no be..3

st-ato brav-o.

be... good..

‘However, basically you shall be careful. You have not gone up with your weight.

I thought it was worse, but no, you have done well.’

P: No perché gon-o col cortison-e.

no because swell-.1 with-the.. cortisone.

‘No, I swell. Using the cortisone I swell.’

N: Pes-o stabil-e proprio. Il pes-o stabil-e,

weight. stable.. indeed the.. weight. stable..

veramente stabil-e. Allora.

really stable.. then

‘Weight stable indeed. e weight is really stable. en.’

P: Sono gon-o per que- que:::- il cortison-e,

be..1 swollen.. because this.. … the.. cortisone.,

quell-o che mi f-a gon-are.

that.. that me make..3 swell.

‘I am swollen because of this…. e cortisone, that makes me swell.’

N: Esam-e del pied-e nella norm-a. quand’è

control. of-the.. foot. in-the.. standard. when

che ha fatto l’operazion-e:::

be..3 that have..3.. the..-surgery.

‘e foot control is normal. When did you undergo the surgery?’

e misunderstanding is related to dierent adjustments (broadening or narrow-

ing) of to swell. e nurse relies on the previous contexts in which to swell is used

when people are weighed in order to indicate any increase in weight. e patient, in

contrast, acts based on the presumptive interpretation associated with the specic

 Fabrizio Macagno

context of the eects of drugs. In this sense, the nurse is overlooking the evidence

that the patient is providing (using the cortisone); she takes into account only the

evidence resulting from weight control, backed by the presumption that the patient

intends to continue the discourse in a relevant way.

is excerpt also shows a potential pragmatic misunderstanding in the last

turn, evidenced by the nurse’s failure to continue the dialogue. is case can be con-

sidered both as a lack of uptake (Evidence6) (the patient underscores for the second

time his expression of distress), and an irrelevant turn (Evidence5). e nurse,

instead of acknowledging the expression of a preoccupation, requests information

on another issue. However, these pieces of indirect evidence can also be explained

in a dierent way, and more specically as a refusal to engage in the conversation

any further due to time constraints (the nurse needs to continue the visit).

A similar case of misunderstanding at the level of the purpose of the utterance is

given by the following excerpt (Macagno & Bigi 2017a: 68). In this conversation, the

doctor is talking about the patient’s failure to record the higher levels of glucose in

the journal that diabetes patients have for self-monitoring the trend of the disease.

At the end of the doctor’s turn, when she ends by pointing out that the very high

values that had not been transcribed in the journal have contributed to an increase

in the overall glucose parameter, the patient’s wife replies (at 10) by asking: so, what

can be the cause of this situation?, thereby demonstrating that she failed to under-

stand the pragmatic function of the doctor’s previous moves.

Case 7: Irrelevance

1. D: Allora se lei non le riport-a

now if you not it... write_down..3

naturalmente f-a un dann-o a lei. Perch-è

clearly do..3 a.. damage. to you because

lei st-a peggio

you st ay..3 bad.

‘Now, if you don’t write them down clearly you are damaging yourself.

Because you feel worse.’

2. P: Li prov-o ma non segn-o praticamente

it... t r y. .1 but not write_down..1 practically

quell-o che eettivamente…

what that actually…

‘I try them but I do not write down what actually…’

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

3. M: Èla prim-a person-a, è la

be..3 the.. rst.. person., be..3 the..

prima person-a lei, che si deve rend-ere

rst.f. person. you, that he. shall..3 become.

conto. Oh guard-a, h-o avuto delle

aware oh look..3 have..1 have. some-the..

iperglicemi-e, sono arriv-ato a 300, che

hyperglycemia. be..1 arrive-... to 300 what

cos-a h-o fatto.

thing- have..1 do.

‘You are the rst person, you are the rst person you, who should become

aware. Oh look, I have had hyperglycemias, I got to 300, what I have done.’

4. P: Cosa h-o cosa quale èil motiv-o. per

what have..1 what what be..3 the.. reason. for

quale motiv-o?

what. reason.?

‘What I have what what is the reason. For what reason?’

5. M: Eh ma se lei non lo scriv-e? esatto.

Eh but if you not it... write_down..3 exactly

Èla prim-a person-a lei che

be..3 the.. rst.. person. you who

dev-e f-are.

shall..3 do-.

‘Eh but if you don’t write it down? Exactly. You are the rst person, yourself,

who shall do it.’

6. P: Che devo controll-are.

who shall..1 control.

‘Who shall control.’

7. M: Poi si può controllare si può

en you..3 can control. you...3 can

confrontare con noi enoi siamo qui.

discuss. with we. and we be..1 here

‘en you can control, you can discuss with us and we are here.’

8. P: A d-ar-mi spiegazion-i

to give--me. explanation.

‘To give me explanations.’

 Fabrizio Macagno

9. M: Tutt-o il temp-o a su-a disposizion-e, ma io che

all.. the.. time. to your. . disposal., but Ithat

oggi la ved-o con un prol-o con un

today he.. see..1 with a.. prole. with a..

compens-o glicemic-o di 9con con un-a

balance. glycemic.. of 9with with a..

glicata che era a 7.3, quindi

glycated_hemoglobin

that .be.3 to 7.3 therefore

era perfett-a per la su-a età, oggi

be.3.  perfect.. for the.. your.. age, today

è 9 e dic-o, ma cosa cosa è

be..3 9 and sa y..1, but what what be..3

successo?

happen...

‘Always at your disposal, but I see you today with a prole with a glycemic

balance of 9, with a glycated hemoglobin that was of 7.3, therefore that was

perfect for your age, today is at 9 and I say, but what, what has happened?’

10. W: Ecco cosa da cosa può esser dipeso quell-o?

yes what from what can..3 be. depend. that..

‘Yes what, on what can it depend?’

11. P: Quell-o sbalz-o lì.

that.. surge. there

‘at surge there.’

e misunderstanding of the communicative purpose of the doctor’s utterances

is evidenced by incoherent turns. At 1, the doctor is reprimanding the patient for

damaging himself by failing to record the high values. At 3, the doctor is checking

whether the patient has understood the importance of being aware of dangerous

levels of glucose. However, in the following move (4) the patient is not acknow-

ledging his fault, but rather replying with an incoherent utterance (Evidence5),

asking for information about his increased values. At 5, the doctor expresses an

uptake of the patient’s acknowledgment of his crucial role in self-monitoring. is

turn shows a misunderstanding of the pragmatic purpose of the patient’s utterance

(Evidence5), which, however, is not detected by the patient. e conversation

moves on until, at turn 9, the doctor expresses her puzzlement when she discovers

that the glycated hemoglobin is much worse than before, but the journal shows only

good levels of glucose. e doctor’s utterance (an expression of puzzlement aimed

at underscoring the seriousness of the patient’s behavior) is completely misunder-

stood by the wife and the patient (turns 10 and 11), who, instead of acknowledging

the problem, ask for information (Evidence5).

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

is misunderstanding can be explained considering the interpretative reason-

ing involved. At turn 9, the doctor grounds her interpretation on specic pragmatic

presumptions. Since in the previous turns she directly expressed her complaints and

disappointment with the patient’s behavior, she can presume that her interrogative

sentence is interpreted as an expression of her dislike of and puzzlement over the

patient’s values. e patient, however, fails to consider the evidence from the pre-

vious turns and interprets the utterance according to the presumptive association

between syntactic structure and force as a request or desire for information.

. Conclusion

is paper proposes an approach to misunderstandings focused on their explan-

ation, namely, the justication of the conicting interpretations which result in

problematic communication. To this purpose, misunderstandings have been ana-

lyzed in terms of the presumptions that the speaker and the hearer can rely on in

justifying their interpretation. e notion of presumption allows us to address in

logical terms the problem of common knowledge, namely, the attributing of spe-

cic knowledge to the interlocutor. In the view presented in this paper, the speaker

and the hearer draw tentative conclusions about the other’s behavior and possible

interpretations based on what is commonly the case considering the context and

the available evidence. Interpretation, in this view, becomes the result of an inter-

pretative reasoning grounded on dierent types and levels of presumptions and on

the assessment of contextual and cotextual evidence.

From this perspective, misunderstandings can be regarded as conicts of pre-

sumptions or assessments of presumptions, which occur for distinct reasons. Some

misunderstandings are caused by presumptions which are subject to default in the

given context or conversational setting, whose provisos are, however, overlooked or

ignored by one of the interlocutors. Other misunderstandings result from conict-

ing presumptions having dierent strengths; also in this case, evidence corroborat-

ing or weakening an interpretation can be overlooked by one of the interlocutors.

Finally, in some cases the mismatching interpretations can be considered as equally

backed by their underlying presumptive reasoning. ese distinctions can be useful

for detecting the possible causes of misunderstandings, which can be traced back

to cultural dierences or overlooking of evidence.

is analysis can be possible only aer the identication of misunderstandings.

To this purpose, the symptoms of misunderstandings have been classied accord-

ing to their probative weight. Evidence has been distinguished according to its

dialogical nature (meta-dialogical vs. dialogical) and evidential weight (direct vs.

indirect). In this fashion, general categories of evidence have been dierentiated.

 Fabrizio Macagno

e combination of the classication of the causes and symptoms can be used

for analyzing conversations and bringing to light when and why the interlocutors’

interpretations mismatch. In particular, the application of this type of analysis of

doctor–patient interviews in diabetes care shows the dierence between direct

(and stronger) and indirect evidence, which can result in dierences in detecting

misunderstandings. e analysis of the interpretative reasoning underlying misun-

derstandings highlights the dierent presumptions the interlocutors are relying on,

and the dierent types of evidence– contextual, conversational, and cultural– they

are taking into account (or missing) in their interpretations.

Acknowledgements

Fabrizio Macagno would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and construct-

ive comments and suggestions, which helped rene and clarify the ideas presented. e author

also thanks the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia for the research grants no. IF/00945/2013/

CP1166/CT0003, PTDC/FER-FIL/28278/2017, and PTDC/MHC-FIL/0521/2014

References

Allwood, Jens & Yanhia Abelar. 1984. Lack of understanding, misunderstanding and language

acquisition. In Guus Extra & Michèle Mittner (eds.), Studies in second language acquisition

by adult immigrants, 27–55. Tilburg: Tilburg University.

Atlas, Jay David & Stephen Levinson. 1981. It-cles, informativeness and logical form: Radical

pragmatics (revised standard version). In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical pragmatics, 1–62. New

York: Academic Press.

Bazzanella, Carla & Rossana Damiano. 1999. e interactional handling of misunderstanding in

everyday conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 31(6). 817–836.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00058-7

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0378216698000587

Bench-Capon, Trevor & Henry Prakken. 2010. Using argument schemes for hypothetical rea-

soning in law. Articial Intelligence and Law 18(2). 153–174.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-010-9094-8

Bigi, Sarah. 2011. e persuasive role of ethos in doctor–patient interactions. Communication

and Medicine 8. 67–75. https://doi.org/10.1558/cam.v8i1.67

Bigi, Sarah. 2014a. Healthy reasoning: e role of eective argumentation for enhancing elderly

patients’ self-management abilities in chronic care. In Giovanni Riva, Paolo Ajmone Marsan

& Claudio Grassi (eds.), Active ageing and healthy living: A human centered approach in

research and innovation as source of quality of life, 193–203. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-425-1-193

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana & Elite Olshtain. 1986. Too many words: Length of utterance and prag-

matic failure. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 8(2). 165–179.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263100006069

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

Brennan, Susan & Herbert Clark. 1996. Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 22(6). 1482–1493.

https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.22.6.1482

Chaiken, Shelly & Yaacov Trope (eds.). 1999. Dual-process theories in social psychology. New

York: Guilford Press.

Clark, Herbert. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, Herbert & Susan Brennan. 1991. Grounding in communication. In Lauren Resnick,

John Levine & Stephanie Teasley (eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition, 127–149.

Washington: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10096-006

Dascal, Marcelo. 2003. Interpretation and understanding. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publish-

ing Company.

Dascal, Marcelo & Isidoro Berenstein. 1987. Two modes of understanding: Comprehending and

grasping. Language & Communication 7(2). 139–151.

https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(87)90004-8

Dewey, John. 1938. Logic– e theory of inquiry. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Dijk, Teun van & Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of discourse comprehension. New York: Aca-

demic Press.

Evans, Jonathan. 2003. In two minds: Dual-process accounts of reasoning. Trends in Cognitive

Sciences 7(10). 454–459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2003.08.012

Giora, Rachel, Shir Givoni, Vered Heruti & Ofer Fein. 2017. e role of defaultness in aecting

pleasure: e optimal innovation hypothesis revisited. Metaphor and Symbol 32(1). 1–18.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2017.1272934

Grimshaw, Allen D. 1980. Mishearings, misunderstandings, and other nonsuccesses in talk: A

plea for redress of speaker-oriented bias. Sociological Inquiry 50(3–4). 31–74.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00016.x

Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gumperz, John & Deborah Tannen. 1979. Individual and social dierences in language use. In

Charles Fillmore, Daniel Kempler & William Wang (eds.), Individual dierences in language

ability and language behavior, 305–325. New York: Academic Press New York.

Hamblin, Charles Leonard. 1970. Fallacies. London: Methuen.

Humphreys-Jones, Claire. 1986. An investigation of the types and structure of misunderstandings.

Newcastle University.

Kaur, Jagdish. 2011. Intercultural communication in English as a lingua franca: Some sources of

misunderstanding. Intercultural Pragmatics 8(1). 93–116.

https://doi.org/10.1515/IPRG.2011.004

Kecskes, Istvan. 2008. Dueling contexts: A dynamic model of meaning. Journal of Pragmatics

40(3). 385–406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.12.004

Kecskes, Istvan. 2010a. e paradox of communication: Socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics.

Pragmatics and Society 1(1). 50–73. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.1.1.04kec

Kecskes, Istvan. 2010b. Situation-bound utterances as pragmatic acts. Journal of Pragmatics

42(11). 2889–2897. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.06.008

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0378216610001803

Kecskes, Istvan. 2013. Intercultural pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kecskes, Istvan. 2015. Intracultural communication and intercultural communication: Are they

dierent? International Review of Pragmatics 7. 171–194.

https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-00702002

 Fabrizio Macagno

Kecskes, Istvan & Fenghui Zhang. 2009. Activating, seeking, and creating common ground: A

socio-cognitive approach. Pragmatics & Cognition 17(2). 331–355.

https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17.2.06kec

Kissine, Mikhail. 2012. Sentences, utterances, and speech acts. In Keith Allan & Kasia Jaszczolt

(eds.), Cambridge handbook of pragmatics, 169–190. New York: Cambridge University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139022453.010

Levinson, Stephen. 1992. Activity types and language. In Paul Drew & John Heritage (eds.), Tal k

at work: Interaction in institutional settings, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1979.17.5-6.365

Macagno, Fabrizio. 2011. e presumptions of meaning: Hamblin and equivocation. Informal

Logic 31(4). 367. https://doi.org/10.22329/il.v31i4.3326

Macagno, Fabrizio. 2017. Defaults and inferences in interpretation. Journal of Pragmatics 117.

280–290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.06.005

Macagno, Fabrizio. 2018. Assessing relevance. Lingua 210–211. 42–64.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2018.04.007

Macagno, Fabrizio & Sarah Bigi. 2017a. Understanding misunderstandings: Presuppositions and

presumptions in doctor–patient chronic care consultations. Intercultural Pragmatics 14(1).

49–75. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2017-0003

Macagno, Fabrizio & Sarah Bigi. 2017b. Analyzing the pragmatic structure of dialogues.

Discourse Studies 19(2). 148–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617691702

Macagno, Fabrizio & Douglas Walton. 2017. Interpreting straw man argumentation: e pragmatics

of quotation and reporting. Amsterdam: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62545-4

Mauranen, Anna. 2006. Signaling and preventing misunderstanding in English as lingua franca

communication. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 177. 123–150.

https://doi.org/10.1515/IJSL.2006.008

Milroy, Lesley. 1984. Comprehension and context: Successful communication and communica-

tive breakdown. In Peter Trudgill (ed.), Applied sociolinguistics, 7–31. London: Academic

Press.

Moeschler, Jacques. 2004. Intercultural pragmatics: A cognitive approach. Intercultural Pragmat-

ics 1(1). 49–70. https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2004.007

Moeschler, Jacques. 2007. e role of explicature in intercultural communication. In Istvan

Kecskes & Laurence Horn (eds.), Explorations in pragmatics: linguistic, cognitive and inter-

cultural aspects, 73–94. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Mustajoki, Arto. 2008. Modelling of (mis)communication. Prikladna lingvistika ta ligvistitshni

tehnologii Megaling-2007, 250–267. Kiev: Dovira.

Mustajoki, Arto. 2012. A speaker-oriented multidimensional approach to risks and causes of mis-

communication. Language and Dialogue 2(2). 216–243. https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.2.2.03mus

Recanati, François. 2002. Does linguistic communication rest on inference? Mind and Language

17(1–2). 105–126. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0017.00191

Rescher, Nicholas. 2006. Presumption and the practices of tentative cognition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498848

Romero-Trillo, Jesús & Elizabeth Lenn. 2011. Do you “(mis)understand” what I mean? Pragmatic

strategies to avoid cognitive maladjustment. Journal of English Studies 9. 223–241.

Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Jeerson & Gail Scheglo. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organi-

zation of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4). 696–735.

Sayer, Inaad Mutlib. 2013. Misunderstanding and language comprehension. Procedia-Social and

Behavioral Sciences 70. 738–748. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.01.118

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings 

Schank, Roger & Robert Abelson. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into

human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Scheglo, Emanuel. 1987. Some sources of understanding in talk-in-interaction. Linguistics 25.

201–218. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1987.25.1.201

Scheglo, Emanuel, Gail Jeerson & Harvey Sacks. 1977. e preference for self-correction in

the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53(2). 361–382.

https://doi.org/10.2307/413107

Schlesinger, Izchak & Sharon Hurvitz. 2008. e structure of misunderstandings. Pragmatics &

Cognition 16(3). 568–585. https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.16.3.07sch

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2003. An outline of the role of context in comprehension. In Ewald Mengel,

Hans-Jörg Schmid & Michael Steppat (eds.), Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth. Proceedings, 435–

445. Trier: Wissenschalicher Verlag Trier.

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Black-

well Publishing Ltd.

omas, Jenny. 1983. Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics 4. 91–112.

https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/4.2.91

Tzanne, Angeliki. 2000. Talking at cross-purposes: e dynamics of miscommunication. Amster-

dam: John Benjamins Publishing.

Uleman, James. 1999. Spontaneous versus intentional inferences in impression formation. In

Shelly Chaiken & Yaacov Trope (eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology, 141–160.

New York: Guilford Press.

Uleman, James, Adil Saribay & Celia Gonzalez. 2008. Spontaneous inferences, implicit impres-

sions, and implicit theories. Annual Review of Psychology 59(1). 329–360.

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093707

Vendler, Zeno. 1994. Understanding misunderstanding. In Dale Jamieson (ed.), Language, mind,

and art, 9–21. Amsterdam: Springer.

Verdonik, Darinka. 2010. Between understanding and misunderstanding. Journal of Pragmatics

42(5). 1364–1379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.09.007

Wagner, Edward H., Brian T. Austin, Connie Davis, Mike Hindmarsh, Judith Schaefer & Amy

Bonomi. 2001. Improving chronic illness care: Translating evidence into action. Health

Aairs 20(6). 64–78. https://doi.org/10.1377/hltha.20.6.64

Walton, Douglas. 2002. Legal argumentation and evidence. University Park: e Pennsylvania

State University Press.

Walton, Douglas & Fabrizio Macagno. 2016. Proles of dialogue for relevance. Informal Logic

36(4). 523. https://doi.org/10.22329/il.v36i4.4586

http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/4586.

Walton, Douglas & Chris Reed. 2008. Evaluating corroborative evidence. Argumentation 22(4).

531–553. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-008-9104-0

Walton, Douglas, Christopher Reed & Fabrizio Macagno. 2008. Argumentation Schemes. New

York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802034

Weigand, Edda. 1999. Misunderstanding: e standard case. Journal of Pragmatics 31. 763–785.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00068-X

Weinstock, Charles B., John B. Goodenough & Ari Z. Klein. 2013. Measuring assurance case

condence using Baconian probabilities. 2013 1st International Workshop on Assurance

Cases for Soware-Intensive Systems (ASSURE), 7–11. San Francisco: IEEE.

https://doi.org/10.1109/ASSURE.2013.6614264

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6614264/.

 Fabrizio Macagno

Wyner, Adam & Trevor Bench-Capon. 2007. Argument schemes for legal case-based reasoning.

In Arno Lodder & Laurens Mommers (eds.), Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Legal

Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2007: e twentieth annual conference, 139–149.

Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Yus, Francisco. 1999. Misunderstandings and explicit/implicit communication. Pragmatics 9(4).

487–517. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.9.4.01yus

Zaeerer, Dietmar. 1977. Understanding misunderstanding: A proposal for an explanation of

reading choices. Journal of Pragmatics 1(4). 329–346.

https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(77)90027-3

Author’s address

Fabrizio Macagno

ArgLab– Instituto da Filosoa da Nova (IFILNOVA)

Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Edifício I&D– 4 andar

Avenida de Berna 26, 1069–061 Lisboa

Portugal

fabriziomacagno@hotmail.com

Publication history

Date accepted: 17 April 2018

Biographical notes

Fabrizio Macagno (Ph.D. UCSC, Milan, 2008) works as a researcher and invited auxiliary pro-

fessor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is author of more than 80 papers on denition,

presupposition, argumentation schemes, and dialogue analysis published on major international

peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Argumentation,

and Philosophy and Rhetoric. His most important publications include the books Argumentation

Schemes (CUP 2008), Emotive language in argumentation (CUP 2014), and Interpreting straw

man argumentation (Springer 2017).

Syntactic Parsers and Profiles of Dialogue Applied to the Fallacy of Amphiboly

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2020

Douglas Walton

Amphiboly has been widely recognized, starting from the time of Aristotle, as an informal fallacy arising from grammatical ambiguity. This paper applies the profiles of dialogue tool to the fallacy of amphiboly, providing a five-step evidence-based procedure whereby a syntactically ambiguous sentence uttered in a natural language text can be evaluated as committing a fallacy of amphiboly (or not). A user applies the tool to a natural language text by comparing a descriptive graph, representing how the argumentation actually went, to a normative graph, representing how the argumentation should ideally have proceeded.

Considering Mono-and Multilingual Interactions on a Continuum: An Analysis of Interactions in Medical Settings

Chapter

Full-text available

Dec 2019

In this contribution, we adopt a theoretical framework that allows to consider mono- and multilingual medical settings on a continuum, thus offering analysts of communication homogeneous tools for the analysis of misunderstandings and communicative breakdowns in these contexts. After considering the main issues regarding misunderstandings in mono- and multilingual settings, we propose to consider doctor-patient interactions by using the concept of activity type. Combining this perspective with the socio-cognitive approach (SCA), we show how our description of the clinical interactions allows to produce hypotheses that can be tested empirically. We describe dialogical processes that may allow the parties to build a common ground starting from the salient aspects of two perspectives that are often different and misaligned, yet may still be reconciled.

"Why Doesn't He Care About Me?" Intercultural Misunderstandings Between Chinese Doctoral Students and Their Malaysian Supervisors

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2024

Addressing intercultural misunderstandings has become crucial with the rise in students pursuing doctoral studies overseas. This study examines the factors contributing to intercultural misunderstandings and the processes by which they arise. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 Chinese doctoral students from various disciplines. Through thematic analysis, key factors leading to misunderstandings were gender, language, social culture, research culture, and communication style. Furthermore, guided by expectancy violation theory, the study develops a framework for understanding how misunderstandings arise. It enriches existing literature by examining intercultural misunderstandings in the Asian higher education context and highlights future directions for exploring strategies to mitigate them.

A multidimensional model of interaction as a framework for a phenomenon-driven approach to communication

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2021

Arto Mustajoki

Interaction between people is a cornerstone of being human. Despite huge developments in languages and communicative skills, interaction often fails, which causes problems and costs in everyday life and work. An inability to conduct dialogue also produces conflicts between groups of people, states and religions. Therefore, there are good reasons to claim that miscommunication and failures in interaction are among the most serious problems in the world. Researchers from different fields-linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, brain research, philosophy-have tried to tackle this complex phenomenon. Their method-driven approaches enrich our understanding of the features of interaction in many ways. However, what is lacking is an understanding of the very essence of interaction, which needs a more holistic, phenomenon-driven approach. The aim of this paper is to show that the only way to reach this goal is multidisciplinarity, that is, using the results and methods of different fields of research. This is not an easy goal and task because the way of thinking and doing research varies greatly discipline-wise. A further obstacle is the researchers' training, which, as a rule, focuses on the tradition of only one field of research. The Multidimensional Model of Interaction provides a good framework for a more holistic approach to interaction by viewing the complex phenomenon from different angles. The model includes various phases of the process of interaction, beginning with the choice of the topic by the speaker and ending with identification of the reference by the recipient, as well as the mental worlds of the interlocutors (knowledge, attitudes, values, emotional state etc.), recipient design (accommodation of speech) and external circumstances.

Coding relevance

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2019

Fabrizio Macagno

Relevance is one of the crucial criteria for assessing the quality of argumentation in education. In argumentation and education, relevance has never been analyzed or coded. While several theories have included in their analysis some indicators of cohesion or clarity, this characteristic of dialogue and discourse has never been addressed as a distinct phenomenon. This paper builds on the existing studies in linguistic and philosophy to advance criteria for assessing relevance, which in turn can be used for developing a coding scheme for evaluating dialogue moves. Relevance is analyzed starting from the pragmatic principle that dialogue moves are instruments for pursuing a common dialogical goal. Starting from a classification of the possible types of dialogue moves, defined based on the possible dialogue that they propose or continue, five criteria of relevance are illustrated, capturing both pragmatic and topical coherence. Such criteria are shown to provide guidance for distinguishing not only relevant from irrelevant moves, but also the degrees of strength of relevance. The theoretical framework and the assessment criteria will be illustrated through a corpus of classroom interactions collected in Portuguese middle-grade schools.

Coding Problematic Understanding in Patient–provider Interactions

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2019

This article proposes a coding scheme for identifying and assessing linguistic evidence of problematic understanding in health-care provider communication with patients affected by type 2 diabetes mellitus. Drawing on the existing literature in pragmatics and linguistics, the scheme is grounded on the distinctions between the different types of linguistic evidence of the occurrence of a misunderstanding or a problematic understanding, divided into three levels (stronger, acceptable and weak) based on their probative force. The application of the scheme is illustrated through a pilot study, conducted on an Italian corpus of 46 transcripts of videotaped consultations between six health-care providers and 13 patients affected by diabetes mellitus type 2. The most frequent types of linguistic evidence of problematic understanding were the categories of "acceptable" (amounting to 58% of the total) and the "strong" evidence (35%). Patients' problematic understanding was detected to occur significantly more frequently than health-care providers. Providers were also found to be significantly more aware of possible misunderstandings, tending to verify more frequently the correctness of their own interpretations. This pilot study represents a first step in the process of developing a productive evidence-based tool for detecting problematic understanding, which can be used for implementing linguistic strategies for helping prevent the risk of misunderstandings in health-care communication. Our findings show that misunderstandings are widespread between patients and that some linguistic strategies may be more effective than others in preventing the risk of misunderstandings, suggesting possible directions of research for improving health-care providers' communicative skills.

25 - Intercultural Pragmatics in Healthcare Communication

Article

Sep 2022

Istvan Kecskes

Medical communication is characterized by an essential cultural difference, as the nature of healthcare provider–patient interactions consists of an epistemic imbalance between the expert and the layperson. This specialized knowledge gap combines with other types of cultural differences, defined by mismatched background knowledge (including values, expectations, facts, or theories) and the proficiency in the use of distinct languages or dialects. Such cultural differences define a type of communication that is essentially and primarily intercultural. Drawing on examples from different types of medical communication, we provide an overview of these studies in linguistics, pragmatics, and health communication to describe differences and commonalities between pragmatic strategies used in interactions of different types and levels of “interculturality.” We propose a more consistent integration of pragmatics in healthcare communication by looking at how shared understanding is obtained in language-discordant contexts through the mediation of interpreters. Based on this analysis, we design a new communicative role for healthcare providers highlighting future perspectives for clinical training and practice. In this sense, the role played by an intercultural pragmatic approach in healthcare communication leads to redefining pragmatic strategies as part of a communicative toolbox, and not only as a discipline explaining how context affects meaning.

Avoidance of cognitive efforts as a risk factor in interaction

Article

Jun 2022
DISCOURSE STUD

In an ordinary interaction, communicants have various, mostly unconscious goals which reflect their interactional, social and personal needs. In these interactions, people’s minds try to find a balance between reaching these goals and consuming cognitive energy. If a speaker puts too little effort into speech production, she risks not achieving her communicative goals. This is especially typical when the atmosphere is relaxed, a good example of which is family discourse. An analysis of recorded conversations shows that there are certain regular manifestations of risk-taking in family discourse, such as expressing immature thoughts, raising a large variety of topics and overguessing. A substantial amount of risk-taking in family discourse is in one way or another connected with false confidence in the interlocutors’ common ground. Family members know each other well, which results in an overestimation of the similarity of their understanding of words and objects. This attitude leads them to use cryptic, hard-to-comprehend speech. Quick, everyday interactions are mostly automated, and the speakers do not recognise that their speech is full of implicitness and underdeterminacy.

Coding empathy in dialogue

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2022
J PRAGMATICS

Empathy, broadly defined as the ability to experience another's emotions and perceptions, is one of the major attitudes and actions underpinning an individual's participation in dialogue across diversity. The goal of this methodological paper is to operationalize empathy as a discursive construct, manifested in children and adolescent dialogic interactions. A coding scheme is developed based on three distinct steps. First, a review of the operational definitions of empathy is carried out, to capture how its related values, skills, and dispositions have been detected thus far. Second, the definitional elements resulting from this overview are represented in the dialogical notion of other-orientedness, which can be manifested, actually and potentially, in discourse. Moves are distinguished in 8 categories based on their disposition to be potentially other-oriented (dialogicity), which becomes actually manifested depending on their relevance to the discourse they are used in. Dialogicity and relevance are captured by the coding scheme proposed in this paper, which is validated and used to illustrate how it can reveal dialogical empathy and the development of common ground in interactions.

The risks of misunderstandings in family discourse: Home as a special space of interaction

Article

Nov 2020

Based on a large dataset of Russian material, the paper presents these general features of a of the home: a place to spend leisure time containing a long-established group of different ages and sexes free to move about in their environment These factors lead to tension between communicants and a diversity of topics of conversation. Inadequate recipient design is an overarching trigger for misunderstanding caused by the speaker. It derives from poor concentration on interaction and the common ground fallacy, and leads to the frequent use of indirect and elliptical expressions. Inadequate concentration causes the recipient to non-listen and overguess. Finally, misunderstandings occur because of mishearings, misinterpretations and misreferences. Misinterpretation may concern the content, intention or mode of the message.

Activating, seeking, and creating common ground: A socio-cognitive approach

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2009

This paper argues that current pragmatic theories fail to describe common ground in its complexity because they usually retain a communication-as-trans-fer-between-minds view of language, and disregard the fact that disagreement and egocentrism of speaker-hearers are as fundamental parts of communication as agreement and cooperation. On the other hand, current cognitive research has overestimated the egocentric behavior of the dyads and argued for the dynamic emergent property of common ground while devaluing the overall significance of cooperation in the process of verbal communication. The paper attempts to eliminate this conflict and proposes to combine the two views into an integrated concept of common ground, in which both core common ground (assumed shared knowledge, a priori mental representation) and emergent common ground (emergent participant resource, a post facto emergence through use) converge to construct a dialectical socio-cultural background for communication. Both cognitive and pragmatic considerations are central to this issue. While attention (through salience, which is the cause for interlocutors' egocentrism) explains why emergent property unfolds, intention (through relevance, which is expressed in cooperation) explains why presumed shared knowledge is needed. Based on this, common ground is perceived as an effort to converge the mental representation of shared knowledge present as memory that we can activate, shared knowledge that we can seek, and rapport, as well as knowledge that we can create in the communicative process. The socio-cognitive approach emphasizes that common ground is a dynamic construct that is mutually constructed by interlocutors throughout the communicative process. The core and emergent components join in the construction of common ground in all stages, although they may contribute to the construction process in different ways, to different extents, and in different phases of the communicative process.

Assessing relevance

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2018
LINGUA

Fabrizio Macagno

This paper advances an approach to relevance grounded on patterns of material inference called argumentation schemes, which can account for the reconstruction and the evaluation of relevance relations. In order to account for relevance in different types of dialogical contexts, pursuing also non-cognitive goals, and measuring the scalar strength of relevance, communicative acts are conceived as dialogue moves, whose coherence with the previous ones or the context is represented as the conclusion of steps of material inferences. Such inferences are described using argumentation schemes and are evaluated by considering 1) their defeasibility, and 2) the acceptability of the implicit premises on which they are based. The assessment of both the relevance of an utterance and the strength thereof depends on the evaluation of three interrelated factors: 1) number of inferential steps required; 2) the types of argumentation schemes involved; and 3) the implicit premises required.

Do you "(Mis)Understand" What I Mean? : Pragmatic Strategies to Avoid Cognitive Maladjustment

Article

Full-text available

May 2011

This article studies misunderstanding as a key factor in identifying the psychological basis of interactional cognitive maladjustment. The study focuses on the linguistic strategies to avoid pragmatic misunderstanding employed in conversations in Spanish and English and between native and non-native speakers of English. In particular, we analyze the use of pragmatic markers as adaptive management to avoid misunderstanding in conversation. Through the classification of pragmatic markers as rhetorical or overt, we study the distribution and use of each type of pragmatic marker and the implementation of pragmatic markers, with the lexical and intonational implications in cross-linguistic conversation for the adaptive Management of misunderstanding.

Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation: The Pragmatics of Quotation and Reporting

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2017

This book shows how research in linguistic pragmatics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric can be connected through argumentation to analyze a recognizably common strategy used in political and everyday conversation, namely the distortion of another’s words in an argumentative exchange. Straw man argumentation refers to the modification of a position by misquoting, misreporting or wrenching the original speaker’s statements from their context in order to attack them more easily or more effectively. Through 63 examples taken from different contexts (including political and forensic discourses and dialogs) and 20 legal cases, the book analyzes the explicit and implicit types of straw man, shows how to assess the correctness of a quote or a report, and illustrates the arguments that can be used for supporting an interpretation and defending against a distortion. The tools of argumentation theory, a discipline aimed at investigating the uses of arguments by combining insights from pragmatics, logic, and communication, are applied to provide an original account of interpretation and reporting, and to describe and illustrate tactics and procedures that can be used and implemented for practical purposes.. This book will appeal to scholars in the fields of political communication, communication in general, argumentation theory, rhetoric and pragmatics, as well as to people working in public speech, speech writing, and discourse analysis.

Defaults and inferences in interpretation

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2017
J PRAGMATICS

Fabrizio Macagno

Intercultural Pragmatics

Book

Dec 2013

Istvan Kecskes

Talking at Cross-Purposes: The dynamics of miscommunication

Book

Mar 2000

Angeliki Tzanne

Interpretation and Understanding

Book

Oct 2003

Marcelo Dascal

Our species has been hunting for meaning ever since we departed from our cousins in the evolutionary tree. We developed sophisticated forms of communication. Yet, as much as they can convey meaning and foster understanding, they can also hide meaning and prevent comprehension. Indeed, we can never be sure that a "yes" conveys assent or that a smile reveals pleasure. In order to ascertain what communicative behavior "means", we have to go through an elaborate cognitive process of interpretation. This book deals with how we achieve the daily miracle of understanding each other. Based on the author ’s contributions to pragmatics, the book articulates his perspective using the insights of linguistics, the philosophy of language and rhetoric, and confronting alternatives to it. Theory formation is shaped by application to fields of human activity – such as legal practice, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, the media, literature, aesthetics, ethics and politics – where interpretation and understanding are paramount. Using an accessible language, this is a book addressed to specialists as well as to anyone interested in interpreting understanding and understanding the potentialities and limits of interpretation.

Discourse Strategies

Book

Sep 1982

John J. Gumperz

To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds. The urgent need to overcome such barriers to effective communication is also a central concern of the book. Examples of conversational exchanges as well as of longer encounters, recorded in the urban United States, village Austria, South Asia and Britain, and analyzed to illustrate all aspects of the analytical approach, and to show how subconscious cultural presuppositions can damagingly affect interpretation of intent and judgement of interspeaker attitude. The volume will be of central interest to anyone concerned with communication, whether from a more academic viewpoint or as a professional working, for example, in the fields of interethnic or industrial relations.

Intercultural Pragmatics

Chapter

Jan 2018

Istvan Kecskes

Intercultural Pragmatics is concerned with the way the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages, communicate in a common language, and, usually, represent different cultures (cf. Kecskes 2013). The communicative process in these encounters is synergistic in the sense that in them existing pragmatic norms and emerging, co-constructed features are present to a varying degree. Intercultural Pragmatics represents a socio-cognitive perspective in which individual prior experience and actual social situational experience are equally important in meaning construction and comprehension.

Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings

Abstract and Figures

Recommended publications

Conflict of Norms and Conflict of Values in Law

Types of Dialogue and Pragmatic Ambiguity

Defaults and inferences in interpretation

Understanding misunderstandings. Presuppositions and presumptions in doctor-patient chronic care con...

Assessing relevance