Verbale Interaktion mit missverstehen : eine empirische Untersuchung zu deutschsprachigen Diskussionsforen

This study examines the functions of phrases with the word missverstehen in any inflected form in German discussion groups. The corpus consists of about 600 different messages with a phrase containing the verb missverstehen from all kinds of discussion groups speaking the German language. The hypothesis is that those phrases do not always refer to a factual misunderstanding in the communication. There is no such thing as total understanding in communication, since people cannot fully know how other people are thinking. Instead understanding is a social construct. Misunderstanding occurs when a group member cannot interpret a message so that it correlates with what the sender has meant. This understanding contains both the discussed theme as well as the relation between the group members.