A Pragmatic Approach To The Textual Functional Of Discourse Markers And Its Application In Teaching

Discourse markers (DMs) refer to those words, phrases or sentences which can signal the coherent relations, indicate pauses, transitions, or other aspects of communication when we are talking. DMs can be used to signal either local coherence or global coherence and play an important role in speech communication. So a good command of employing DMs not only helps us to process our communication smoothly but also helps us to achieve coherence in a discourse. So far the research on DMs has become one focus in the field of pragmatics. However, it seems that the studies of DMs have never been more complete. Compared with other approaches, the relevance-based approach provides the most convincing and promising framework to explain the use of DMs in language. In view of this, the present study centers its attention on the appearance of English DMs in speech communication with the purpose of exploring their textual function in communication under the framework of Relevance Theory. In addition, the thesis also probes what implications the theoretical framework has for EFL speaking. Therefore, the present study is theoretically and practically significant.Coherence has always been one focus of study in modern linguistics. The studies on coherence undergo three main stages, namely semantic, pragmatic, and pragma-cognitive. Based on the definition of relevance and two general principles, Relevance Theory is a comparatively more systematic approach to coherence. According to Relevance Theory, discourse coherence is a consequence of the hearer's searching for optimal relevance. However, the textual function of DMs lies in their helping the hearer search for optimal relevance through casting constraints upon the utterance production and interpretation. Communication is a dynamic process of osten-inference. For a speaker, communication is a process of ostension. He must try to make his communicative intention explicitly; on the part of the hearer, communication is a process of inference, he must infer the speaker's implication with the help of the given linguistic devices. From the viewpoint of utterance production, DMs can be used to help the speaker organize information, produce clear utterances. The speaker will use DMs to produce the utterances with different degree of clarity...