| Discourse markers(hereinafter referred to as DMs),as a widely-known concept in Discourse Analysis(hereinafter referred to as DA),compose a heatedly studied research subject in linguistics.Especially with the establishment of pragmatics as a crucial branch in linguistics,the importance of DMs has been realized by the academia.Many scholars,experts and others who are interested in linguistics have studied DMs by defining their distinguishing features from perspectives of phonology,syntax,semantics and pragmatics.In addition,DMs,without semantic meanings as they are,their pragmatic functions facilitating language comprehension attract much attention.Schiffrin once proposed 11 DMs.These DMs like “well”,“you know” and“I mean”,later,have become the most studied research subjects in DM category.And theories like Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory are applied to many studies in terms of their pragmatic functions,which have gradually evolved into “Relevance School” and “Coherence School”.With the previous studies as fundamental literature basis,this thesis,taking the expression guess what as the research object and Langacker's Cognitive Reference Point(CRP)model as the theoretical framework,collects and selects relevant data from spoken sub-corpus in COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English)in order to do quantitative and qualitative analyses about the expression guess what.Through analyzing and discussing,this thesis attempts to answer three research questions progressively: 1)To what extent is guess what defined as DM?2)Can DM guess what serve as CRP? If yes,how does it function? If no,why?3)What kind of pragmatic functions does guess what have as DM?Major findings of this study are displayed as follows: To begin with,the expression guess what,with reference to other core members like “I mean”,“you know” and “I guess”,can definitely be ascribed into DM category based on prototype theory and family resemblance.Besides,the expression guess what,once defined as DM guess what,is classified into front guess what and middle guess what accordingto their positions in the utterances.For the front guess what,it serves as primary CRP while as secondary CRP for the middle guess what.Both guess whats function in CRP models with some differences.Lastly,the specific pragmatic functions of DM guess what are classified based on common consensus about conversational communication from the perspectives of conversational topic,conversational content and turn.In terms of the first two perspectives,both front guess what and middle guess what undertake the functions of topic-starting,topic-switching and topic-expanding in conversational topic part,and emphatic function,explanatory function and correctional function in conversational content part.As for conversational turn,the front guess what and middle guess what respectively function to take the turn and keep the turn.Among all these pragmatic functions,the two kinds of DM guess whats,comparatively speaking,show different tendencies.The guess what as primary CRP displays its favor to functions in conversational topic part while the guess what as secondary CRP in conversational content part.In addition,all the functions from three perspectives are not exclusive from each other,even ones from same perspective can co-exist on one guess what except in conversational topic part.This study sheds some lights on DM studies by taking the expression guess what as DM which entering the DM family,turns into a new choice of research subject for further studies.It confirms the possibility and feasibility of combining CRP theory with DM studies.And also,it is of great significance for EFL learners to comprehend and acquire the DM guess what in real sense. |
PDF Full Text Request