Analysis Of Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Markers

Discourse markers are so pervasively used in daily communication that a goodcommand of employing and understanding discourse markers not only helps us toprocess our communication smoothly but also helps us to achieve coherence in thediscourse. So the research on the discourse markers is of great theoretical andpractical significance.The fact that taking a discourse marker away from the host discourse segment itis attached to does not affect the sentence's grammaticality judgments or itspropoitional content but does affect the pragmatic appropriateness and interpersonaladaptation on the social level indicates that their employment is not syntactically orsemantically oriented but pragmatically motivated .So the studies on DMs in the pastten years grew with the development of pragmatics with dozens of articles appearingannually.However, researches on DMs, though rich and fruitful, are far from beinghomogeneous and complete. We identify two main distinctive pragmaticperspectives on DMs, i.e., the discourse-coherence-based perspective represented bySchiffrin and Frase, and the cognitive-pragmatic perspective represented byBlakemore and Jucker. There is no consensus on the terminology and functions onthe studies of DMs .The present research, assuming that a comprehensive account ofDMs, conducts a general survey into the pragmatic functions of DMs from the twoperspectives mentioned above, aiming at proving that both the two perspectivescontribute to the explanation of the pragmatic functions of DMs and neither of themshould be overemphasized because they are complemented.The present dissertation consists of four chapters. In the part of introduction thegeneral properties of DMs and organization of this dissertation are presented.In Chapter One, on the basis of a survey into the earlier studies on DMs, thepresent study deals with the two approaches to DMs with a working definition in theend. The coherence-based approach and the syntactic/pragmatic approach and thecognitive pragmatic approach are discussed separately.Chapter Two investigates the researches on DMs conducted from the cognitivepragmatic perspective which is based on the Relevance Theory framework. It firstpresents the ostensive and inferential communication and the Principle of Relevance.Then it mainly introduces the cognitive motivation of employing discourse markers...