A Pragmatic Study Of Discourse Marker You Know From A Relevance-theoretic Perspective

Discourse markers (hereafter, DMs), usually words or phrases showing various logical relationships between utterances, are everywhere in language use. Relevant research (Stubbs, 1983; Goddard, 1998; Schiffrin, 1987; Stenstrom, 1994; Fraser, 1999; Redeker, 1991; Blakemore, 1992; Van Dijk, 1979) finds that taking a DM away from the "matrix clause" (Feng, 2008) it is attached to does not affect the sentence's grammaticality or proposition but does affect the pragmatic appropriateness and interpersonal adaptation at the social level, which indicates that they are a part of the information organization and have the dynamic pragmatic features of constraining discourse production and interpretation partially or wholly (He & Ran, 1999). Studied from different perspectives, DMs are defined variously, such as conjunction, discourse connectives, logical connectors, discourse operators, discourse particles, pragmatic expressions, pragmatic markers, and so on (ibid). The diversity of definitions reflects the universality of research methods and the abundant functions of DMs. What is worth pointing out is that the same DM can have diverse pragmatic functions. This thesis will study the pragmatic functions of DM you know from a relevance-theoretic perspective.Relevance theory, with its notions of procedural encodings(meanings), contextual effects and processing effort, provides the necessary analytical framework to account for the functions of pragmatic markers in terms of their constraints on the inferential process in utterance interpretation (Wang, 2005). Following the Relevance Theory, this thesis attempts to analyze the pragmatic functions of DM you know in conversation supported by the occurrence of you know in the novel Gone with the Wind. The analysis provides evidence that DM you know exhibits different pragmatic functions when used in different contexts and as an ostensive leading marker in communication and it constrains the production and interpretation of utterances. This thesis aims to help people learn more about the pragmatic functions of DM you know in language thus produce and understand languages much better.