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Office, E.E. Miscommunication. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60065 (accessed on 05 October 2026).
Office EE. Miscommunication. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60065. Accessed October 05, 2026.
Office, Encyclopedia Editorial. "Miscommunication" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60065 (accessed October 05, 2026).
Office, E.E. (2026, September 16). Miscommunication. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60065
Office, Encyclopedia Editorial. "Miscommunication." Encyclopedia. Web. 16 September, 2026.
Miscommunication
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Miscommunication is an interactional condition in which participants do not achieve sufficiently convergent understandings of an utterance, communicative action, or discourse sequence for the purposes of the ongoing exchange. It may arise when a recipient interprets linguistic form, referential content, implicature, presupposition, speech act, stance, or contextual relevance differently from that projected by the speaker or from the interpretation required for coordinated interaction [1][2]. The phenomenon is not limited to errors in lexical decoding or factual transmission: it encompasses divergences produced by ambiguity, insufficient common ground, differing contextual assumptions, nonverbal or prosodic cues, and incompatible discourse expectations. In conversation, miscommunication is often interactionally identifiable through delayed, incongruent, or inappropriate responses and through repair sequences that seek clarification, correction, or reformulation [2]. It is distinguished from deliberate deception, in which a communicator intentionally promotes a false belief, and from mere disagreement, in which interlocutors may accurately understand one another while maintaining incompatible evaluations or positions. Miscommunication concerns a breakdown, partial failure, or instability in the joint construction and recognition of meaning rather than the simple absence of message transmission [1].

Pragmatic inference common ground conversational repair mutual understanding

 Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies • Language and Linguistics • Arts and Humanities • Social Sciences

References

  1. H. P. Grice. Logic and Conversation; Walter de Gruyter GmbH: Berlin, Germany, 1975; pp. 41-58. [CrossRef]
  2. Emanuel A. Schegloff; Repair After Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation. Am. J. Sociol. 1992, 97, 1295-1345. [CrossRef]
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