A Relevance-theoretical Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Marker Anyway In Prison Break

The study of discourse markers becomes a new topic in the research of conversation analysis and pragmatics in recent years. What the discourse markers convey is not the propositional meaning or the semantic meaning. That is to say, they do not constitute the semantic content of discourse, but rather to provide informational mark for the understanding of utterance. Since the different starting point and focus, scholars have not reached agreements on its name, definition, classification and functions so far. The previous studies are mainly from three angles: coherent-based approach, grammatical-pragmatic and pragma-cognitive approach. The most worth mentioning is the Blackmore's relevance-theoretical study from the cognitive perspective. She studies the discourse markers based on Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory, which indicates that the appearance of discourse markers rendered ostensiveness and produced contextual effects in order to indicate to hearer that he has to make correspondent processing effort to achieve maximal relevance with the speaker and to ensure successful communication.Previous researchers have seldom conducted the specific discourse marker anyway in opera settings. In order to extend the study of discourse markers anyway, which has traditionally been treated as a contrastive discourse marker, this study attempts to analyze anyway discourse within the framework of relevance theory. The author collects data from the popular American soap opera Prison Break. Through analyzing the features of anyway in data, the author explores what pragmatic functions of anyway are and whether there can be certain strategies in utterances by using discourse marker anyway.Through analyzing the definition of anyway in several dictionaries and based on the theory of Fraser (1999), the author defines anyway as a discourse marker into four distinctive categories, which are:1. Anyway, as a topic change marker, leads the interaction to be conducted from one topic to another, pushes discourse forward naturally, thus achieving the coherent force. Moreover, it signals the hearer to readjust the context of assumptions.2. Anyway, as a contrastive markers, is linked to the cognitive effect of contradiction and elimination.3. Anyway, as an elaborative marker, indicates that there will be an explanation on the prior information.4. Anyway, as an inferential marker, gives an instruction to interpret the proposition that it introduces as the logical consequences.Through the analyses, this thesis not only demonstrated the common points of discourse markers within relevance-theoretical framework, but also added a detailed analytical example into the broad relevance-theoretical framework for the study of discourse markers. What's more, this research has made further efforts to support Blakemore's general view on discourse markers, and proved relevance theory to be a more interpretative theory in analyzing the functions of discourse...