| Discourse markers, which have attracted great interest of many scholars since 1970, are extensively used in communication. Discourse markers are one of the common language phenomenons, which function in various communications from different perspectives. The former scholars have studied discourse markers from grammatical, syntactic and pragmatic aspects. However, the definition and classification of discourse markers have not come to an agreement.This paper studies discourse markers from a pragmatic view based on the presidential debate language. The former studies have analyzed discourse markers from a lot of language corpus but few people investigate discourse marker from a debating context. Debate has a long history since ancient times, and presidential debate is a hot topic especially in modern society. With the debate issues organized and held more and more frequently all over the world, the discourse markers which take up an important status in debate language should be paid great attention from the linguistic perspective.Through a general study and analysis of the previous researches, Relevance theory and Adaptation theory provide a theoretical framework in most studies. In this thesis, besides the two theories mentioned above, Politeness Principle is also introduced to investigate discourse markers in debate language. According to the data collected from the 2008 American Presidential Debate, the thesis tries to explore different functions of the discourse markers. Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are employed in the study to get a complete conclusion. The importance of discourse markers in a debate is verified by the quantitative analysis in the paper. Different functions of these discourse markers appeared in the selected materials are detailed analyzed by the qualitative approach.In conclusion, the discourse markers contribute a lot to the debating process. The present study expects to shed a new light on further studies in this field.
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