A Study Of Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Markers And,but,so In TED Talks From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Taking human cognition characteristics and process as its starting point,relevance theory regards the communication between people as a kind of cognitive activity.The theory holds that human cognition has a general goal,that is,trying to use the smallest investment to get the greatest cognitive effect.In order to achieve this goal,people have to focus on the most relevant information.According to this theory,public speakers generally express the discourse information of the speech to the greatest extent,so that the audience can pay the least possible price for understanding.As a popular worldwide speech,TED is a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization devoted to spreading ideas,usually in the form of short,powerful talks.TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology,Entertainment and Design converged,and today covers almost all topics-from science to business to global issues-in more than 110 languages.Meanwhile,independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.As one of the hot issues concerned in pragmatic study,discourse markers(DMs)such as and,but,so,are frequently utilized in daily life so that they are considered as a typical speech phenomenon in English.Although many academicians in different periods hold different opinions in the area of name,definition,classification and functions of DMs from the time of researching them,it is authorized that DMs do not cause any change of the truth conditions of the utterance but convey the meaning of attitude and step during communication.Based on the framework of relevance theory,with the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,this thesis selects 100 internationally influential TED talks,and conducts research on three DMs and,but,so.The 100 talks include four topics of education,business,environment,and technology,each with 25.And the author tries to analyze the following questions.First: what are the distributions of DMs and,but,so in TED talks? Second,what are the frequencies of DMs and,but,so in TED talks? Third,what are the pragmatic functions of DMs and,but,so in TED talks? Through the research on these three DMs and,but,so in the selected 100 TED talks,the author hopes it will be helpful for the further utilization and teaching of DMs.This study draws these following conclusions: 1.The three DMs and,but,so are widely employed in TED talks,and the one that are most widely employed is the DM and,and in TED talks with different topics,the distribution of these three DMs is also very different;2.Different DMs show different distributions and frequencies in some TED talks with the same topic,and one DM shows different distributions and frequencies in some TED talks with different topics;3.In TED talks,the main functions of DMs are to make speeches more fluent and discourses more coherent.In addition,the employment of DMs can also attract the attention and interest of the audiences,and shorten the distance between the speakers and audiences.And DMs also help the speaker further elaborate the content of their speeches,and explain the implied meaning of the discourses used in the current context;And the DMs can strengthen the speakers’ tone in order to convince the audiences.Also,the DMs can explain the meaning of the context,repair the utterances,and introduce the communicative purpose of utterances.