A Pragmatic View Of Added Discourse Markers In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting At Premier’s Press Conference

Research on discourse markers began in the1970s and forty years or so havepassed since then. During the past forty years, a lot of scholars have conductedresearch on discourse markers from various perspectives. There is comprehensiveresearch as well as research on certain specific properties of discourse markers.Up till now, a consensus has been reached on the prevalent pragmatic functions ofdiscourse markers though the unified definition is yet to be set. However, moreand more explanative definitions of discourse markers will pave the way forunified definition in the near future.In this thesis, the author plans to explain the significance of discoursemarkers by means of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, especially thetheory’s explanation of ostensive-inferential communication and the twostandards of optimal relevance. The thesis has all its examples from thetranscriptions of the Chinese-English consecutive interpreting at Chinesepremier’s press conference from the year of2002to the year2006. By comparingthe source language texts and the target language texts, the author focuses on theaddition of discourse markers in the interpreted outputs of interpreters at Chinesepremier’s press conferences and explores the reason why the addition occurs andthe significance of doing so.The author adopts the explanative definition of discourse markers byRanYongping as the working definition and adopts his classification of discoursemarkers, plus one more type according to the author’s observation of thetranscriptions. So in this thesis, discourse markers are divided into nine types, i.e.reformulation markers, topic-related markers, inferential markers,manner-of-speaking markers, contrastive markers, evidential markers, temporalmarkers, self-assessment markers and locutionary performatives. Different signsare used to mark the different added discourse markers in the target languagetexts. Manual marking and the searching tool of Microsoft Word are needed here. Then, the author explores the reasons why these nine kinds of discourse markersare added, their functions and the significance of doing so in the contexts of thetarget language texts.