Language is a system of correlating meaning and expression, and the general purpose of communication is to come to an understanding. The assumed difficulty in ex- plaining what understanding is, shared by philosophers, psychologists, educators, and linguists (see Helmstad, ), has been approached in one way or another in the field of philosophy, psychology, cognition, and pedagogy.
From a philosophical perspective, some philosophers of language believe that understanding is inextricably linked to believing (Romero-Trillo, ). For in- stance, Edwards () associated understanding with interpretation, which adheres more to the hermeneutical tradition12 than the epistemological tradition13 in trying to
find out what understanding really means in philosophy. In this approach, explicit
12 According to Palmer (), the term hermeneutics covers both the first order art and the second or-
der theory of understanding and interpretation of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions. As a theory of interpretation, the hermeneutic tradition stretches all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy. Dur- ing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hermeneutics emerges as a crucial branch of Biblical studies. Later on, it comes to include the study of ancient and classic cultures.
13 As presented by BonJour () and Hacking (), on the one hand, epistemology is the study of
knowledge and justified belief; on the other hand, ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of be- ing, existence, and reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. The epistemological
tradition mainly stretches some ways of dealing with issues such as the nature and scope of knowledge,
the necessary and sufficient conditions for it, the sources and structure of it, and the limits of it. The on-
tological tradition deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how
such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.
21
communication is categorised as content preserving and the communicators do not challenge the ideas contained in the communicated messages by means of any infer- ential process. Romero-Trillo () assumed that this approach marginalised the context that is created by the speaker and the listener in favour of what is simply believed to be true as what is understood. However, how to understand understand- ing and how to assess or evaluate understanding still remains a complex question that not only involves philosophical but also linguistic and psychological structures and reconstructions behind it.
From a cognitive perspective, understanding is a slippery conceptualisation, and speakers can only rely on the other’s certification of having or not having understood a certain concept or proposition in order to attest to the understanding of an idea (Romero-Trillo, ). The cognitive approach studies the relationship between cog- nitive processes and meaning. However, Weigand () pointed out that under- standing cannot be viewed as a cognitive process, because the speaker is not aware of the misunderstanding at the time when it occurs. Understanding and misunder- standing must therefore be communicative or interactional rather than cognitive. There would be no way of telling the difference between understanding and misun- derstanding by looking only at the cognitive process—they are the same. Thus, the unfolding discourse on an interactional level is needed to identify that a misunder- standing has occurred (see more discussions in the following section).
From a psychological perspective, Bruner () has stated that the central con- cept in human psychology is meaning (p. ) and the process and transaction in- volved in the construction of meaning is understanding (p. ). This psychological approach is also cognitive. Because no one could possibly understand or access what others really understand deep down in their minds, overt (i.e., publically expressed) understanding is the focus of the studied phenomenon of understanding in general. The comprehension and learning of knowledge, for instance, in terms of connecting facts, relating the newly acquired knowledge to what is already known, and using it to solve both old and new problems, has become important when assessing under- standing in psychological and pedagogical studies (e.g., Mintzes, Wandersee, & No- vak, ; Fisher & Frey, ).
From a pedagogical perspective, in the domain of teaching and learning, Nicker- son () claimed that to understand something does not only mean “having the knowledge of it” but also “doing something with it” (p. ). Understanding is often accounted for as an outcome of, an objective in, or a prerequisite of learning (Säljö, ). Among other things, for example, how learners implement knowledge in practice (in particular in technical training), understanding has been frequently as- sessed through the learner’s performance in a written test or oral questions (even in
22
technical training schools). It shows that in both pedagogy and psychology research, the assessment of understanding involves more or less linguistic devices in both spo- ken and written form.
This thesis aims to investigate certain linguistic devices and explore how under- standing is conveyed through or in relation to them. As the linguist Ziff (, p. ) suggested, “to understand understanding is a task to be attempted and not to be achieved today or even tomorrow”; the present study makes some attempts and con- tributions in order to understand more about understanding (in relation to some particular linguistic devices) in human social interaction in real-time.