Discourse Markers And Politeness

This study is conducted in the field of research on discourse markers that have attracted many scholars'attention both at home and abroad in recent years. Discourse markers are so widely used in daily communication that a good command of discourse markers not only helps us achieve coherence in the discourse but also helps us manage our communication successfully. So the research on discourse markers is of great theoretical and practical significance.The fact that taking a discourse marker away from the host discourse segment to which it is attached does not affect the sentence's grammar or its propositional 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. So the studies on discourse markers in the past ten years have been growing drastically with the development of pragmatics. Although scholars have studied a lot on discourse markers, few researches are from politeness perspective.As a universal phenomenon, politeness plays a role in establishing and maintaining social harmony and prescribing individuals'linguistic behaviors. After the publication of"Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena"by Brown and Levinson in 1978, politeness and its phenomena have gained increasing attention from many linguists, anthropologists, sociolinguists, socio-psychologists and pragmatists in terms of their definitions, ways of their application, some general theories and even cross-cultural studies. The famous linguists Brown, Levinson (1978) and G. N. Leech (1983) have made special contributions in this field.Since discourse markers and politeness phenomenon are both extensively used in communication, could they bear any close relationship? Using Brown and Levinson's"Face Theory"and Leech's"Politeness Principle"to analyze discourse markers in Chinese and English, the author of this paper tries to find how closely they are related. As far as the content is concerned, this paper will include the following sections: Chapter One will introduce the history of how discourse markers have been addressed; Chapter Two will review the theories on politeness; Chapter Three will investigate the relationship between discourse markers and politeness through some examples and finally, Chapter Four is the concluding remarks.