Pragmatic Presupposition and Discourse Misunderstanding

Discourse misunderstanding is a common and pervasive phenomenon in verbal communication.Verbal communication involves language production and language interpretation from interlocutors.Pragmatic presupposition which acts as a prerequisite for discourse construction and pragmatic inference plays an important role in verbal communication.This paper tries to probe into the pragmatic presupposition source for discourse misunderstanding based on Relevance Theory and Prototype Theory.By analyzing some linguistic data,the writer points out that inadequate quantity of pragmatic presupposition and pragmatic vagueness from the speaker result in the production of the speaker's utterance which is not ostensive and salient enough for the addressee's inferential interpretation.Consequently,discourse misunderstanding arises.