| Discourse marker(hereafter,DM)is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in languages use.Though not conveying propositional meaning,DMs convey procedural meaning,serving as a guideline for the utterance interpretation.This study selects the Chinese television news show Newsline and the English television news show Anderson Cooper 360 °(hereafter,AC 360)as research data,and adopts Ran Yongping’s classification to classify the English DMs and Chinese DMs into eight types.The study also adopts the Relevance Theory and Halliday’s three metafunctions of language as theoretical framework to explore the pragmatic functions of some of the Chinese DMs and their English counterparts in Newsline and AC 360 and to see how these DMs impose constraints on interpretation.The English data are from CNN’s official website and the Chinese data are from Phoenix TV’s official website and the subcorpus of Newsline in Media Language Corpus.To ensure the comparability,the texts with same or similar topics are extracted as the data.The tool Antconc(3.3.4w)is applied to extract the relevant data.The result shows that the eight types of DMs take up different ratios in the Chinese data and the English data.However,both of English and Chinese reformulation markers rank the top.This finding may imply that as information providers the hosts and guests in the talk shows have the obligation to explain the topics or issues to the audiences elaborately.While other types like attitudinal markers,contrastive markers,referential markers take up different ratios in the data.It may indicate that the employment of the DMs is not only influenced by different modes of thinking and the features of language,but also by the speaker’s subjective choice.Furthermore,we also find that the top 10 English DMs are not the same as their Chinese counterparts.The finding suggests that the frequencies of the English DMs and the Chinese DMs are not one-one equivalent.Further analyses focus on the three pairs of the English DMs and the Chinese DMs with same or similar meanings are chosen from the top ten frequencies list,which are respectively I think and wo juede;I mean and jiushi/jiushishuo;so and suoyi.The study finds that I think has the textual function of indicating topic transition,while wo juetde does not possess this function in the data.Both of them have the interpersonal function of downtoning and displaying speaker’s subjective evaluation.In addition,I think can be used to display speaker’s positive attitude and to signal hesitation.On the textual level,I mean and jiushi/jiushishuo perform the function of introducing supplementary explanation,besides,I mean has the function of transforming the means of expression.On the interpersonal level,both of them have the function of indicating self-repair,additionally,I mean has the attention-getting function,while jiushi/jiushishuo can be used to signal hesitation.So and suoyi have the textual function of signaling topic continuation.In addition,suoyi has the function of transforming topic.Both of them perform the interpersonal function of indicating a comment,additionally,so has the function of signaling response and indicating hesitation or uncertainty.In verbal communication,the English DMs and the Chinese DMs have the function of imposing pragmatic constraints on the utterance interpretation.In certain context,the English DMs and the Chinese DMs constrain the inference of utterance meaning so that the hearer can easily find the relevance between the utterance and his cognitive context,in this way,these DMs enable the hearer to understand the speaker’s utterance meaning appropriately.In addition,the different features of language,modes of thinking and the subjective choice of the speaker give rise to the functional and distributional differences between the English DMs and the Chinese DMs. |
