A Pragmatic Study Of The Discourse Market Oh In Desperate Housewives

Discourse markers witnessed their early studies back in the 1970s.They have attracted wide interest and tremendous research ever since.The present study,with its focus on the discourse marker oh,takes an American soap opera Desperate Housewives (season 1) as its research data and provides a systematic analysis of oh in it.The thesis starts with the rationale of the study and a definition of discourse markers and then goes on its journey to a review of related studies and a theoretical framework of Schiffrin's Coherence Model and Relevance Theory.After a long discussion of the pragmatic functions of oh,the thesis comes to a conclusion.Findings show that oh can serve such pragmatic functions as inference,information repairing,information shift in local coherence and non-local coherence.It helps to effectively convey information and to make communication smoother.Within the framework of Relevance Theory,oh,characterized by strong prosody,can express moods such as surprise,sorrow and happiness in the ostensive-inferential process.It can also be employed to indicate hesitation,supplement,mitigation,etc.so as to create a mutual cognitive context for the speaker and the hearer and to achieve optimal relevance.The present study is conducive to English language learner's correct use and understanding of the discourse marker oh in the process of their language acquisition.It also helps them to have a good command of the pragmatic functions of oh in English literary works and is expected to be beneficial to translation studies.