| In the1970s, with the establishment and development of the pragmatics, an increasing number of scholars have focused on the study of discourse markers from pragmatic perspectives. At present, most domestic researches about discourse marker are holistic, and the studies on pragmatic functions of individual discourse marker are rarely founded. This paper aims to analyze the pragmatic functions of discourse marker so, on the basis of relevance theory and try to figure out the differences on the usage of discourse marker so between Chinese students and English native speakers.This paper is divided into six chapters:chapter one is a general introduction of the study, outlining the research background, purpose, the significance and organization of this paper; chapter two is about the description of terminology and definition of discourse markers, and present studies of the theme at home and abroad; chapter three is the theoretical framework of relevance theory and its mechanisms on discourse markers; chapter four and five are the main parts:chapter four takes the script of American series Desperate Housewives(season2) as the corpus of the native spoken language, which to be found that739places containing so, among which295of them are identified as discourse marker. Based on the relevance theory8sub-functions of the textual functions and2sub-functions of the interpersonal functions are identified as the pragmatic functions of discourse marker so. In chapter five,200utterances are randomly selected from the COLSEC (College Learners Spoken English Corpus), of which77out of112are used as discourse markers.5of the above8pragmatic functions are founded, and3of them have found no application in COLSEC samples. Comparing with the data from Desperate Housewives, this paper analyzes their different application on discourse marker so between the native speakers and the Chinese students. The last chapter is a conclusion of all the findings in this research.This paper attempts to make some contributions on the study of discourse marker so. Meanwhile, the author hopes to arouse more scholars’ attention to establish a corpus which conducted in a natural daily communication in order to do better relevant researches. |
