Pragmatic Perspectives On Discourse Markers

Discourse markers are so pervasively used in daily language that the proper use and interpretation of them consist of a considerable part of pragmatic or communicative competence. The study of this linguistic phenomena thus bears both theoretic and practical significance. In the past ten years, the study of discourse markers turned into a growth industry in linguistics, with dozens of articles appearing yearly (Fraser, 1999: 932). The fact that taking a discourse marker away from the host discourse segment it is attached to does not affect the sentence's grammaticality judgments or its prepositional content but does affect the pragmatic appropriateness and interpersonal adaptation on the social level indicates that their employment is not syntactically or semantically oriented but pragmatically motivated (Schourup, 1999). It thus might not be a coincidence that the study of discourse markers emerges and grows with the development of pragmatics. Scholars, whether in syntax, semantics or pragmatics, tend to regard discourse markers as a linguistic phenomenon mostly appearing in conversational discourse and serving certain pragmatic functions.However, researches on discourse markers, though rich and fruitful, are far from being homogeneous and complete. We identify four distinctive pragmatic perspectives on discourse markers, namely, the discourse-coherence-based perspective, the syntactic-pragmatic perspective, the cognitive-pragmatic perspective and the perspective which treats discourse markers as indicators of metapragmatic indicators. The termdiscourse marker has different meanings for different groups of researchers, there is no agreement about what elements in a particular language should be referred to as discourse markers, and studies on discourse markers have been done under a variety of overlapping labels. In addition, the following three questions have never been discussed in a unified account: Why are discourse markers used? How do they function in utterance production? and What role do they play in utterance interpretation? The present research, assuming that a comprehensive account of discourse markers is supposed to answer all the questions raised above, conducts a general survey into the existing pragmatic perspectives on discourse markers and tentatively employs Verschueren's theory of linguistic adaptation to account for discourse markers, aiming at some findings which can shed light on further researches pursuing a comprehensive and thorough account of discourse markers.The present dissertation consists of five chapters, with the introduction as Chapter One.In Chapter Two, on the basis of a survey into the earlier attempts to define discourse markers, the present study, taking into account of their commonly cited features, sets forth a working definition of discourse markers, which, having a wider coverage of the expressions that have been treated as discourse markers by different scholars, enables the research to deal with a variety of elements under the same conceptual umbrella. In the process of examining the earlier definitions, the discourse-coherence-based perspective and the syntactic-pragmatic perspective are discussed. It is demonstrated that these two perspectives do take into consideration some pragmatic factors, but their attention is mainly concentrated respectively on how discourse markers are used to create coherence or what relationships they signal between discourse units. Neither of them can account for the three interrelated fundamental questions, which we assume any comprehensive pragmatic account of discourse markers is supposed to answer.Chapter Three investigates the researches on discourse markers conducted from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective, which is based on a relevance-theoretic framework. It is concluded that these researches do give an impressive account for the role of discourse markers in utterance interpretation in terms of the motivations of cognitive constraints, contextual or cognitive effects, but fail to offer satisfactory account f...