On The Pragmatic Functions Of The Discourse Marker OH

In this dissertation, the author, based on the previous study on discourse markers (DMs), keeps his focus on DM oh in The Sun Also Rises to sum up the pragmatic functions of oh in the conversations between or among friends. Most scholars agree that the functions of the common DMs in daily life are dynamic and pragmatic. The present study abroad mainly seeks to assess the role of DMs in different contexts such as an interview, a casual conversation, and an elicited narrative, native and non-native speaker performance. And at home, too, a lot of scholars such as Ran Yongping etc. have done a lot of study on the pragmatic functions of these DMs. As to the DM oh, it covers a range of functions, all of which work to create coherence between a previous utterance and the utterance preceded. Schiffrin describes oh as a marker of information management; indicating that the speaker is changing his/her orientation to information. Similarly, Heritage proposes that when the answer to a question is prefaced with oh, it means that, from the viewpoint of the respondent, the question is problematic in terms of its relevance, presuppositions, or context which cause the impossibility of full explicitness. When used in this way, oh connotes not only that its speaker understands the information provided in the previous turn, but also that the information was somehow contrary to his prior beliefs. Oh can also signal that the information provided in a prior turn is incomplete or incorrect. From the prior study, usually, the pragmatic functions of oh are not systematic yet, and the use of the DM oh in a specific author's works has never been examined, and so the objective of this study is to provide a general overview of the pragmatic functions of oh in the novel mentioned above, and to demonstrate the intricate operations of DM oh in literal interaction at a level of detail that the dictionary definitions have failed to capture. The method the author has chosen for the study is to list out every oh (118 Umes in total) in the novel, and according to their functions in the given context, to...