A Survey of Misunderstandings in Confl ictual Speech Acts

Misunderstanding always happens in confl ictual speech acts, and confl ict resulted from misunderstandings is the subject of pragmatics. This research can help people to understand the causes of the phenomenon, thus forming the harmonious interpersonal relationship. This is a survey of the relationship between conflict speech acts and misunderstanding from the following three aspects: roots of confi lictual speech, mechanism of misunderstanding, and potentiality of misunderstandings in confl ictual speech acts. The theoretical basis is the Adaptation Theory. The failure of the adaptation to contextual factors is the potential root of the two.