A Relevance-theoretic Study On The Pragmatic Functions Of The Contrastive Discourse Markers But And Anyway In Friends

Discourse Marker is widely used in our daily communication. As the pragmatics anddiscourse analysis developed, the DMs become an important research topic at home andabroad and the researches on the pragmatic functions of DMs increased each year. Theresearches on DMs have both the theoretical and practical significances. Discourse markersconvey no propositional meaning or semantic meaning but procedural meaning. They provideinformation for the utterance comprehension and constrain the context so as to guide theutterance comprehension. There are three main approaches of the researches on DMs: thesyntactic-pragmatic approach, semantic-pragmatic approach and cognitive-pragmaticapproach. As a subclass of DMs, the CDMs play an essential part in the utteranceinterpretation and production because of the special semantic meaning. However, the studieson the pragmatic functions of CDMs is not adequate, especially the studies of CDMs underthe specific contexts. This dissertation is devoted to the research of CDMs based onRelevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson. Blakemore holds that DMs expressostensivenss and produce contextual effects in order to indicate the hearer to correspond witheffort and achieve optimal relevance and successful communication. This dissertation appliesthe quantitative and qualitative analysis to analyze the pragmatic functions of the CDMs inthe specific contextual effects of the American soap opera Friends (Season6).In this thesis, the most widely used CDMs but and anyway are chosen as examplesbecause of their high frequency. The research shows that these two markers not only have thecontrastive pragmatic functions such as denial, correction, objection, contrast andstrengthening, but also have non-contrastive pragmatic functions such as shifting topics,changing the talk-turn, hesitation and supplement. Different contexts produce differentpragmatic functions. These analyses not only enrich the researches on CDMs, but also providedetailed examples for the study of CDMs. The most important is that the analysis shows thepowerful interpretability of the Relevance Theory to the study of the pragmatic functions ofDMs, especially the CDMs.