| Discourse markers (DMs for short) acting as a common language phenomenon in daily communication have aroused many researchers'attention both home and abroad. Countless articles and research achievements about discourse markers appear on the various kinds of academic periodicals every year, gradually coming to be a heated topic in the field of discourse analysis and pragmatics studies. Scholars in the related pragmatic fields widely and commonly hold that taking a DM away from the host discourse segment it is attached to does not affect the sentence's grammaticality or its proposition but does affect the pragmatic appropriateness and interpersonal adaptation at the social level, which indicates that the employment of discourse markers is not syntactically or semantically oriented but pragmatically motivated by the specific communicative needs (Schourup,1999).One thing worthy of our mentioning is that scholars, whether studied from the approaches of syntax, semantics or pragmatics, tend to regard discourse markers as a linguistic phenomenon mostly appearing in conversational discourse and serving certain pragmatic functions. Therefore, this study chooses CCTV9-NEWS talk show program Dialogue as our research analytic materials. The purpose is to look into the pragmatic functions of discourse markers used in this special genre of discourse—formal TV talk show interviews. A combination of quantitative description and qualitative explanation is employed. Firstly, statistic work is done to look at the distribution and frequency of discourse markers appearing in the turns by the hosts and the guests during the program respectively. The quantitative results show that not all the discourse markers play the same roles in the discourse. Because guests are the primary information supplier for the program content, they usually tend to apply more discourse markers, both in types and quantities. And then, we choose the most frequently used and most representative five discourse markers (but I think, so, well, you know) for qualitative analysis to scrutinize their pragmatic functions. Our findings indicate that, as a linguistic choice-making device, discourse markers occurring at the different positions of utterance influence the functions thereof. During the verbal communication, speakers are controlled by their metapragmatic awareness. They prefer to choose appropriate discourse markers, which can realize different pragmatic functions and serve to different interactional or communicative needs between the relationships of prior proposition, current proposition and future proposition. Only working with turn-taking mechanism, can discourse markers create discourse coherence and enhance the interactional effect between the interviewer and the interviewee. At the same time, the application of discourse markers in communication can facilitate the maximum relevance of communicative information to mitigate hearers' effort in utterance interpretation and influence the communicative forces of certain expressions activated by dynamic context so as to promote the successful ongoing of conversation.The author hopes the study could extend the scope of the research on discourser markers in some specific discourse genre and provide some reference to the speaker's choice of language strategies in TV talk show programs. It is expected that the investigation into the pragmatic functions of discourse markers emerged in turn-taking operation may help us have a better understanding of how the appropriate language choice can have pragmatic force and establish discourse coherence. |
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