| The study on discourse markers currently has become an interdisciplinary research area of psychology, philosophy and linguistics. In linguistics, many scholars have done researches on different theoretical background. Semanticists, pragmaticists in the Gricean tradition, speech act theorists and discourse analysts all contribute to the studies on discourse markers. Discourse markers have been studied from the syntactico-pragmatic perspective, the semantico-pragmatic perspective to the pragma-cognitive perspective. Discourse markers have attracted the interest of a wide variety of researchers of different ethnicity. A large amount of researches are still carried out from different perspectives. Many research papers on. discourse markers have appeared yearly both domestically and internationally.The present study focuses on the metapragmatic awareness of discourse markers in English and their metapragmatic functions. Discourse markers function on the metalevel and carry with them procedural meanings. The category of discourse markers is viewed as one subcategory of the metadiscourse. Verschueren's theory of adaptation and Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory are the theoretical background of this study. Verschueren's theory of adaptation is used to explain the motivation of the utilization of discourse markers. And Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory is used to explain the mechanism of the utilization of discourse markers.In discourse, discourse markers show different connectivity. They can connect utterance(s), contextual information and can be used isolatedly. Discourse markers, manifesting the language user's metapragmatic awareness, can undertake many metapragmatic functions. They can be used to construct a well-organized discourse, to display the language user's individual intentions and personal emotions, to shorten interpersonal distance, and to adjust interpersonal relationships. There are many factors affecting the actual use of discourse markers in discourse, including...
|
PDF Full Text Request