An Adaptation-Relevance Perspective On The Discourse Markers In Oral Communication

In oral communication Discourse Markers (DMs), which have aroused great interest of many scholars since 1970, are extensively used in most languages. DMs, pervasive in daily language, are a range of special words or lexical expressions, which do not belong to any of the major syntactic categories and do not indicate objects, events or properties but indicate all kinds of logical relationships between utterances. The meanings of DMs do not seem to contribute to the propositional content of the utterances to which they are attached or the conceptual meaning of utterances in which they occur, but once they are moved from the host utterances, some change can be easily felt somewhere. DMs are usually used as an adaptive device helping to manage and maintain the ongoing oral communication and exerting great influence upon the production and interpretation of utterances.DMs have been studied within different theoretical frameworks and investigated for different research purposes during the past dozens of years. Based on Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory, this thesis attempts to present an overview of the different pragmatic approaches to DMs. On the basis of a general survey into divergent approaches to DMs, the author of the thesis has found that none of them provide a fruitful and comprehensive description for the production and interpretation of DMs. In addition, few theories of communicative model such as the Code Theory, Conversational Implicature Theory, Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory, which have been an object of attracting great academic interest from different fields, are adequately convincing. Available are only a few studies on one aspect in language use. Therefore, for the theoretical framework referenced in this thesis, the writer here expects to forge a workable synthesis of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory that will pave the way for further, more empirical, analysis of naturally occurring language. The new model of communication, the Adaptation-Relevance Model tentatively proposed and integrated here can constitute a complementary theoretical framework and be exploited as a tool to explain the production and interpretation of DMs in daily oral communication. And this model is of paramount importance to the understanding of communication and has the potential to offer a comprehensive and thorough account for DMs in oral communication with a view to reveal some findings and implications of the studies on DMs, shedding light on further research for English and even Chinese language teaching and learning.Based on the quantitative study, qualitative analysis as well as naturalistic enquiry, the investigation into the use of DMs in classrooms shows that the frequency of DMs used by students is in direct proportion to that used by their teacher, which indicates that teacher talk is of vital importance for students.As for the contents, this paper first reviews the related previous efforts made on the studies of DMs in the pragmatic field, and then it deals with the theoretical framework concerned such as Adaptation Theory, Relevance Theory, and the synthesized Adaptation-Relevance model as the framework for the present study. Next, within the Adaptation-Relevance theoretical framework, a comprehensive and thorough account for the production and interpretation of DMs is tentatively offered. After that a research on the applications of some commonly-used English and Mandarin Chinese DMs in the classroom teaching environment is launched. The final part is concerned with the ways of teaching DMs so as to enhance students'communicative competence. In concluding part, major findings and some practical implications are summarized.