Abstract
Misunderstanding is one of the significant issue of communication and therefore needs to be explored for successful
accomplishment of communicative task. The study in hand attempts to understand the concept of misunderstanding
and its impact on overall communication event. The “socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics” (SCA) as proposed
by IstvanKecskes and employed byHonghui&Dongchun(2019)provides theoretical underpinnings. Contrary to
traditional pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics, SCA stands in the middle, tries to incorporate and explains
linguistic phenomenon with both social and cognitive factors. This study attempts to inspect the concept of
misunderstanding under SCA, with special reference to the view of Common Ground Co-construction in the
multicultural setting. The study has taken 10 scenes from “Mind your Language” and has attempted to identify the
instances of communication failure and misunderstanding, and its effect on overall process of interaction. The
findings of the study demonstrate that missing common grounds (lack of linguistic, social and cultural knowledge)
lead towardsmisunderstanding among the participants belonging to different cultures; subsequently causes a
communication failure. This failure can be the basic reason of the conflict but within the given context,
misunderstandings lead to hilarious comic situations. This sitcom exploits these instances of misunderstandings and
missing common grounds to producehumorous effect.Hence, a new genre of comedy from intercultural pragmatic
view can emerge, named as comedy of misunderstanding.
Shumaila Ashee, Sadia Nazeer, Ghazala Kausar. (2022) Comedy of Misunderstanding: A Socio-cognitive Analysis of Sitcom ‘Mind Your Language’, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, volume 59, issue 3.
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