A Study Of "well" In Family Album USA-from The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

In order to achieve communicative goals, the language users have to exploit certain linguistic strategies, among which the employment of discourse markers is an important one. As a universal language phenomenon, discourse markers are employed to connect the previous utterance and the following utterance. In fact, the employment of discourse markers is a process of adaptation and a linguistic strategy through which the language users can realize their specific communicative goals. The reasons of adaptation can be divided into two categories: language-internal reasons, and language-external reasons. Linguistic context belongs to the first reason; while social conventions and psychological motivations are attributed to the second reason. Verschueren put forward the theory of linguistic adaptation, which can provide a systematic explanation for the usage of discourse markers and their function in utterance production from the perspective of linguistic, social convention and cultural factors.As a frequently used discourse marker, the pragmatic function of"well"is analyzed from the perspective of adaptation theory. In this research, previous researches on discourse markers are reviewed and Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory is explained in details. Based on Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory, the researcher chooses the natural-language data of Family Album, the U.S.A., and analyzes the usage of"well"in the data in a comprehensive way. According to the data, altogether 287 uses of"well"are found in Family Album, the U.S.A, among which 71 uses of"well"are content words. In terms of adaptation functions, the other 216 pragmatic appearances of"well"are divided into three categories, namely, linguistic context, social conventions and psychological motivations.It can be shown that as a discourse marker frequently used in oral English, the employment of"well"is in fact a kind of linguistic choice and a communicative strategy which can be adopted to achieve specific communicative purposes. On the same time, the application of discourse marker"well"also adapts into the social conventions and specific psychological purposes. The functions of discourse marker"well"in communication can be achieved in the process of adaptation.