Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Marker "So" And Its Translation In Desperate Housewives

Discourse markers (DMs) are so widely used in daily communication that a good command of DMs not only helps the speaker achieve coherence in the discourse but also helps us manage our communication successfully. Therefore, the research on DMs is of great theoretical value and practical significance. With the development of pragmatics, studies on DMs have been growing rapidly and scholars are inclined to research DMs from pragmatic perspective. However, although scholars have studied a lot on DMs, comparatively few researches make analysis through combining pragmatics with translation study.So as a discourse marker can present multi pragmatic functions in different context. It is not semantically oriented and does not add anything to the propositional content of an utterance, but has plenty of pragmatic effects. The author analyzes the pragmatic functions of so in conversations of the American TV series Desperate Housewives and tries to explore how to reflect pragmatic effects of the DM so in the process of translation.The thesis consists of 4 chapters including both theoretical discussions and a case study. Chapter 1 reviews the previous studies in the field of discourse markers both at home and abroad and discusses the theoretical background. It briefly introduces the purpose and significance as well.Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are the core of this thesis. The method the author has chosen for the study is to collect detailed data of so in Desperate Housewives (season 1), group them into different categories and systematically analyze them according to their pragmatic functions in the given context. As a result, the DM so appearing in the corpus (378 times in total) can reflect certain contextual and emotional effects. When so implies contextual effects, it can be used as a conversation trigger and used to indicate speaker's intention. The emotional effects implied by so can express dissatisfaction, irony, indifference, surprise, excitement, anger, impatience and depression of the characters. Moreover, on the basis of the pragmatic approach, the thesis also explores what translation strategies are adopted and how to reflect pragmatic effects of the DM so in the process of translation.Finally, in the last chapter, through drawing a conclusion of the pragmatic functions of so and exploring translation of so in the script, the author has found that the DM so cannot invariably or bluntly be translated into "所以" or "这样". The translator should flexibly deal with the situation according to different pragmatic functions in different context and find out the appropriate Chinese expressions to achieve pragmatic equivalence. Meanwhile, we also find the limitations of the thesis on the one hand and propose the possible ways to further complete the study.Although the thesis is just confined to daily conversations in an American TV series, the research can, to a certain extent, benefit both pragmatic and translation studies.