| From the 1970's, discourse marker has been gaining attention in discourse analysis and pragmatics research. The research of discourse marker mainly focuses on the criteria of identifying discourse markers, the properties of individual discourse markers and the comparison of using discourse markers among different groups of people etc. This study intends to analyze the pragmatic functions of individual discourse marker "so" in the framework of relevance theory.There are altogether 5 parts in this research:the first part is an overall introduction, outlining the background, significance, the purpose and the organization of the thesis. The second part reviews the previous study of discourse marker. The key concepts of relevance theory are introduced in this part also, helping with the understanding of its explanation power of discourse marker. In the third part, the script of American TV series Desperate Housewives (Season 1) is taken as corpus of native spoken language to systematically analyze the pragmatic functions of discourse marker "so" on the basis of relevance theory. In the whole season, there are altogether 843 uses of "so", in which 326 uses are discourse markers. Through research,6 pragmatic functions are identified among these 326 discourse markers "so", including:158 markers of transition,194 markers of inference,10 markers of contemplation,25 markers of mitigation,15 markers of emotion and 14 markers of turn-taking. Besides, the sub-functions of the above functions and the situations in which these functions happen are discussed here. In part four,150 samples of utterance containing "so" selected from COLSEC are analyzed, of which 91 samples are used as discourse markers.4 pragmatic functions are identified:30 markers of transition,73 markers of inference,21 markers of contemplation and 1 marker of turn-taking. Through comparing the result with that in Desperate Housewives (Season 1), this study analyzes the differences of using discourse marker "so" between Chinese students and native speakers. Part five is the conclusion, in which practical suggestions of English learning are given to Chinese students based on the comparison in part four. Limitations of the research are also pointed out in this part.Although many Chinese scholars have been doing detailed study in this field, the research on individual discourse markers such as "so" is still inadequate. The author tries to contribute to it by the research done in this thesis, and also, to provide suggestions for Chinese students, pushing their English learning, especially for speaking ability.
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