A Pragmatic Study Of The Discourse Markers In Obama's Speeches From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Discourse markers, as a common linguistic phenomenon, play an important role in both linguistic generation and interpretation. At present, discourse markers are attracting more and more scholars to do research from various perspectives, making it one of the most important topics in linguistic study and meanwhile gaining huge achievements. Although these researches have provided us with deep insight into discourse markers, there still exists much room to be explored. This thesis studies discourse markers that are used in American President Obama'speeches under the theoretic framework of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory in the hope of calling more attention to the importance of discourse markers and the pragmatic strategies of delivering a speech in the choice of discourse markers.This thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction part. On the basis of a survey into the earlier attempts to define discourse markers, the present study sets forth a working definition of discourse markers, which has a wider coverage of the expressions that have been treated as discourse markers by different scholars, enables the research to deal with a variety of elements under the same conceptual umbrella.In Chapter Two, four different perspectives in the previous study of discourse markers are presented: the discourse-coherence-based perspective, the grammar pragmatic perspective, the cognitive-pragmatic perspective and the meta-pragmatic perspective. In comparison, the Adaptation Theory of Verschueren provides us with a new perspective and a more comprehensive theoretical foundation for the study of discourse markers.Chapter Three is theoretical framework. This chapter focuses on the Adaptation Theory of Verschueren. Verschueren's Adaptation Theory is a theory of behavior and cognition about human language communication. It takes choice and adaptation as its foundation, and explores the psychological mechanism of human linguistic communication, and its process and the roles of social cultures. It reveals the essence of the language use. Adaptation Theory is regarded as a comprehensive pragmatic theory with strong inclusive and explanatory capacity for language.Chapter Four and Five discuss respectively how the speaker chooses discourse markers in order to achieve different communicative aims in accordance with many factors such as mental world, physical world and social world, along with the dynamical adaptable process and meta-pragmatic awareness of the speaker. With adaptation to the mental, physical and social world of the audience, discourse markers are chosen by the speaker in the speech discourse as indicators of hesitation and consideration, as indicators of coherence, as indicators of reinforcement, and as indicators of comment in the speech. It is believed that although discourse marker don't bear propositional meaning, they are indispensable to the fulfillment of different communicative purposes, thus reflect the utterer's meta-pramatic awareness to a great extent.Chapter Six is the concluding remarks. This chapter summarizes some major findings of the thesis and states the theoretical and practical values of the study. At the same time, it points out some of the limitations of this study and puts forward some suggestions for further study. Through the present study, we find the employment of discourse markers in is actually a product of dynamic adaptation to various contextual factors. Discourse markers are not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a communicative strategy. Communicators employ discourse markers to achieve some communicative goals.