A Cognitive-pragmatic Analysis Of Contrastive Discourse Markers

Since the 1970s, interest in DMs has increased commensurately with a growing interest in language production and comprehension. Researches on DMs, though rich and fruitful, are far from being homogeneous and complete. The studies on DMs have been done under more than twenty overlapping labels, which proves that different researchers hold different opinions and offer different explanations of the nature of DMs. There are three main approaches to the study of DMs. Compared with the two approaches of coherence-based and grammatical-pragmatic approach, neither of which provides a psychological explanation for DMs in utterance production and interpretation, the relevance-based cognitive-pragmatic approach provides a more convincing and promising framework for explaining the use of DMs.On the other hand, with the development of research in this field, researchers come to realize that not all DMs make equal contributions in guiding the hearer's interpretation processes. Contrastive discourse markers (CDMs), as a subclass of DMs, with similar meaning of contrast while bearing subtle distinctions when used, are coming to the center of DM research. However, most of the previous CDM researches are dominated by classification and taxonomy at either a syntactic or a semantic level. But is found to be able to occur in almost all the contrastive contexts, but no explanation is given except regarding it as the most general CDM. Based on Relevance Theory, the present study attempts to explore the nature of CDMs from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective, especially the primary CDM but, to seek for the cognitive explanation for its general property when used. Furthermore, some fine-grained distinctions in meaning between but and other CDMs are expected to be captured.The present dissertation consists of five chapters with the introduction as Chapter One. The main content virtually starts from Chapter Two, which provides an overview of the studies on DMs and CDMs. Different approaches to the research on DMs are compared with each other with the aim to introduce the stronger relevance—based framework which could be more promising in exploring the nature and characteristics of CDMs.Chapter Three firstly provides a rough introduction of Relevance theory, then examines the ostensive-inferential communication model and the Principle of Relevance, and finally compared with the traditional views of context, the relevance- theoretic notion of cognitive context is analyzed.In the light of Relevance theory introduced in Chapter Three, Chapter Four gives a tentative account of cognitive motivation for using CDMs. Then the investigation is made on the cognitive property of procedural meaning which makes CDMs crucial in the utterance interpretation. The procedural meaning of CDMs of introducing contradiction and elimination...