The Function Of Discourse Markers In College English Writing In The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Discourse markers (hereafter, abbreviated as DM in this thesis) are widely used in most languages and have been a focus of researches in language development. Studies and researches of how DMs work in language have fallen into two major branches since the 1980's: semantic-pragmatic studies and cognitive-pragmatic studies. Researchers of the first branch focus on the analysis of pragmatic functions of DMs according to their linguistic properties in language construction and interpretation, whereas researchers of the second branch center on the revelation of the cognitive-psychological motivations for using DMs in communication. The second branch's approach, the Relevance-based approach, provides a convincing and promising explanation for the existence of DMs in communication, on which this paper is based to explore the function of DMs in college English writing.Though different researchers hold different views on DMs, they share one common idea that DMs function pragmatically and contribute to coherent relations in discourse. According to Sperber and Wilson (1986), relevance is the key to human cognition and humans only tend to pay attention to the phenomena which are most relevant to them. In accordance with the Principle of Relevance, a speaker who aims at optimal relevance often impose constraints on the hearer's selection of contextual assumptions and thus on his selection of contextual effects. The tighter the constraints, the stronger the resulting implicatures. Using DMs is one of the effective ways the speaker employs to guarantee the hearer to search for the relevance between utterances or between the utterance and the contextual information after affording the least processing effort. On the hearer's side, having recognized that the speaker is being optimally relevant, he is entitled to interpret the utterance in the smallest and most accessible context by making good use of the relationship expressed by DMs. DMs thus are seen as semantic constraints on relevance (Blakemore, 1987). They facilitate the hearer's processing by indicating the direction to search for the optimal relevance of utterances. Coherence arises in searching for...