A Relevance-based Study Of Contrastive Discourse Markers In The Big Bang Theory

Discourse markers,a kind of linguistic expressions indicative of the relationship between discourse segments,have attracted intensive attention from linguists for decades.Among them,contrastive discourse markers(henceforth CDMs)have stood out as one prominent sub-type of the kind,catching intensive attention in pragmatics and discourse analysis because of their complicated meanings and discourse functions.However,most of the studies focus on individual CDMs(e.g.but,nevertheless,and although)and the majority of them have been done on the semantic level.A principled and systematic investigation of CDMs in spoken language with the help of a corpus is still lacking.Against this backdrop,this study is an endeavor for a systematic study of English CDMs in spoken language based on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory.The principal objective is to examine how CDMs help to achieve relevance in communication.To this end,we first made an exhaustive list of all the instances CDMs in the first five seasons of The Big Bang Theory.Then we categorized the CDMs of the sitcom into primary and secondary types according to Fraser’s(2011)classification.After that,based on a close examination of each occurrence,we answered the following three questions:(i)What types of CDMs do communicators use in TBBT?(ii)How do CDMs help communicators to achieve relevance?(iii)Why do communicators use CDMs to achieve relevance?The findings of the study are as follows.First,the primary CDM but occurs much more frequently than other and secondary CDMs are used less frequently.Second,syntactic positions and collocation sentence patterns determine,to a large extent,the occurrences of CDMs.Syntactically,the primary contrastive discourse marker but mainly appears in the middle position of a sentence,while secondary CDMs at the beginning of a sentence.In terms of collocation,declarative sentences are most often collocated with CDMs,while interrogative sentences,imperative sentences,and exclamatory sentences collocate with different CDMs in different ways.Second,to achieve relevance,CDMs manipulate the hearer’s construction of context and contextual effects through their embedded procedural meaning.It is also found that while CDMs imply a more accessibly relevant context for the hearer by changing the topic,CDMs help to achieve relevance by defining contradictory contextual effects through contrasting or denying the prior assumption,providing contrary facts,and constructing other alternatives.Third,CDMs are used by communicators as a stimulus to make his intention explicit,an indicator that he is striving to convey his intention to the listener,and a guide for the listener to make inference about the intended meaning of the discourse,thus to reduce unnecessary effort to interpret the utterances.It is hoped that this study can help us to better understand discourse markers in general and provide implications for studies on CDMs in other languages.