Research On Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Markers In TED Speeches From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

TED is a non-profit organization in the United States,whose speech visitors are more than 100,000 visitors a day.It mainly invites elites who have made outstanding contributions in the fields of science,design,and politics to share their thoughts and explorations on technology,society,and humanity.Therefore,the TED speech has attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad,many of whom focused on the study of textual cohesion,pragmatic presupposition,interpersonal function,interactive meanings,verbal humor and so on,while the study of discourse markers' pragmatic functions in TED speech is not much attended.Discourse markers,as an important part of discourse,can restrict the generation and understanding of discourse and plays a very important role in communication.Therefore,scholars have analyzed them from different research perspectives.Based on Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson,Blakemore studies discourse markers from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics for the hearers to achieve the maximum cognitive effect.Therefore,under the guidance of Relevance Theory,this thesis selects the most popular 10 TED speeches from 2015 to 2017 annually,a total of 30 ones as corpus to analyze the specific use of the speaker's discourse markers and their cognitive pragmatic functions quantitatively and qualitatively.The study showed that the speaker used a large number of discourse markers in the selected TED speeches,and different ones have different use frequency,distribution,and pragmatic functions,of which the top 10 are �and,so,but,now,because,then,well,I think,yes,and you know�.According to the four categories of discourse markers classified by Blakemore,the speaker guides and constrains the audience's understanding of their discourse mainly by using the discourse markers that enhance the existing context hypothesis.Those that produces the contextual implications and contradicts the existing context assumptions are less used while those that indicate the role of utterance are the least used or rarely appear in TED speeches.Finally,Relevance Theory makes a satisfactory explanation to the cognitive pragmatic function of discourse markers in TED speeches.At the same time,this study is of some guiding significance on how to improve one's communicative competence.To a certain extent,it can improve the awareness of English learners to use discourse markers and enhance the understanding of their pragmatic features.