Pragmatic Markers For Understanding Vague Utterances

The present study is an attempt to explore how pragmatic markers contribute to the understanding of vague utterances from the theoretical perspective of relevance theory. Owing to the fact that there is no generally agreed upon definition of the term "pragmatic marker", a working definition of the term employed is provided, which is defined as the linguistic expressions in discourse that play a facilitating role in the interpretation process of the speaker's contextual assumptions. In the meanwhile, the definition of pragmatic vagueness is reemphasized. After reviewing the relevant literature, we find that there is no prior study on the relation between pragmatic markers and pragmatic vagueness, which prompts us to conduct this research. In addition, study on the issues under discussion carried out in the Chinese context is found to lag far behind compared with those of other languages. Hence oral data mainly collected from Chinese conversations are used to account for the general claim in this thesis. Based on our interpretation of the data collected, a broad classification of pragmatic markers is offered, and functions of each category of pragmatic markers are addressed. Accordingly the located positions of pragmatic markers are examined. The detailed analysis of the linguistic data shows that pragmatic markers encoding procedural information which constrain the inferential process of utterance interpretation can make utterances containing vague idea more accessible to the hearer, which is embodied in narrowing down the hearer's search for relevance. Therefore, implications for language learning are briefly discussed with the hope of improving learners' linguistic performance.