Real Effects of Inaccurate Language Comprehension
Real Effects of Inaccurate Language Comprehension

Summary/Abstract: This study investigates one of the most comic scenes in the history of Romanian drama: the reading and interpretation by two comic characters of the article titled “The Republic and the Reaction or the Future and the Past” (in the comedy “A Stormy Night” by I. L. Caragiale). The main conceptual tools used belong to Jean Michel Adam’s “organon”: “ways of instigating to action” and “persuasion”. A faulty interpretation is followed in a comic manner by a persuasion-self-persuasion in the sense suggested by the discourse concerned with the instigation to action. This is argumented by:a) the identification of the receivers’ casual tendency to sympathize with the emitter (which brings about a reception in the register of feelings, emotions and not in the rational one; more precisely, we are dealing with a self-persuasive reception).b) the defective and at the same time comic decoding of the message, which is due to the inaccurate comprehension of the key lexemes of the text: the French word manquer (‘to miss, to turn aside from’) is understood as ‘eat’ (because of its phonemic similarity to the Romanian a mânca ‘to eat’), while the term suffrage is not interpreted as ‘vote’, but as ‘dining room’ (phonemic similarity to the Romanian term for ‘dining room’, i.e. sufragerie).

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