| Discourse markers (hereafter, DMs) are widely used in most languages and have been a focus of research in language development. Linguists, especially pragmaticians, have employed different approaches to the study of DMs since the early 1980's. Levinson (1983: 87) suggests that DMs form a cross-linguistically attested category and stresses the need to study on their own merits in pragmatic terms. Levinson's remarks arouse great interests and attention in the pragmatic field. The study of DMs has henceforth turned into a growing industry and theories of DMs have been developing fast. Especially with the emergence of Relevance Theory, studies of DMs have been reanimated and studies of DMs within the relevance-theoretic framework have become a new trend, which marks a turning point in the development of the study of DMs. Within the framework of Relevance Theory, DMs are considered as linguistic devices whose encoded meaning has the special properties of reducing the number of interpretive assumptions the hearer needs to take into account and hence instructing him to arrive at the optimally relevant interpretation. This is a strong proposal which cannot be expounded by other theories. Borrowing ideas from Relevance Theory and theories of other approaches to DMs, this dissertation attempts to study the different pragmatic approaches to DMs, elaborate the relevance-theoreticapproach to communication, reveal the motivations for using DMs in communication, analyze the functions and classifications of DMs in discourse, and finally unravel some implications of DMs for English language teaching and learning.The dissertation consists of six chapters.Chapter One serves as a general introduction, which is concerned with the significance of studies on DMs, the aims and arrangements of this paper.Chapter Two is an overview of studies of DMs. It first provides a historical sketch of the development of studies on DMs, then explores a synthetical definition of DMs, and finally introduces three main pragmatic approaches to DMs. An early reference to DMs as a linguistic entity was made by Labov and Fanshel (Fraser, 1999: 932) in discussing a question begun with well. Then Levinson's suggestion that DMs should be studied encourages researchers to explore DMs in wide domains. Consequently, theories of DMs have developed very fast and generally have gone into two groups (Ran, 2000a: 8): semantic-pragmatic studies, which focus on the analysis of pragmatic functions of DMs according to the linguistic properties in language construction and interpretation; and cognitive-pragmatic studies, which center on the revelation of cognitive-psychological motivations for using DMs in communication. This chapter also introduces the three representative approaches to DMs and their different views on the nature and definition of DMs. But the Relevance-Theory-related approach provides a convincing and promising explanation of the existence of DMs in communication, and this paper is based on Relevance Theory to explore DMs in the remaining chapters.Chapter Three deals with Relevance Theory and utterance interpretation. It comprises five sections. The first section exposes the relevance-theoretic accounts of the nature of communication. It points out that correct understanding depends on the identification of speaker's real intention by means of a stimulus given by the speaker. The second section centers on the introduction to ostensive-inferential communication model. According to this model, the whole course of communication involves inferring the speaker's explicature and implicature in virtue of identifying his communicative intention. Ostension and inference are two sides of the same process. A speaker is involved in ostension that comes with a guarantee of relevance, and a hearer is involved in inferring the speaker's implied intention. The third section is about the Principle of Relevance. According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance is the key to human cognition. Humans tendto pay attention to those phenomena which are...
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