A Contrastive Study Of Discourse Marker 'You Know' And 'Nizhidao' From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Metafunctions

Discourse Marker (hereafter, DM) is a set of words or phrases used with a pragmatic meaning on a parenthetically linguistic level of discourse, such as adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles, interjections, etc. They are syntactically detachable, having no conceptual meaning but procedural meaning, reflecting the meta-functional awareness of the participants in communication.DMs are frequently used in our daily communication to connect the discourse segments or to indicate the speaker's feelings or attitudes. They are so common in everyday communication that a good command of DMs not only makes the communication smooth and successful but also enhances the cohesion and coherence of the discourse. The study of DMs enables us to better understand the generating and interpreting process of a discourse. Therefore, the present study is of great significance both theoretically and practically.DMs have some prominent features in terms of their syntactic and pragmatic functions. The employment of DMs does not contribute to the propositional content of the host clause, and thus the omission of it does not affect the grammatical judgments of the sentence. However, they do influence the pragmatic appropriateness and interpersonal interaction on the social level. Therefore, they are grammatically or syntactically optional and semantically unmotivated, but pragmatically motivated.This"growing industry"of DMs brought about rich and fruitful achievements. The most influential perspectives on DMs are Syntactic-Pragmatic perspective represented by Fraser, the Coherence-Pragmatic perspective represented by Schiffrin and Rededker, and the Cognitive-Pragmatic perspective represented by Blakemore and Jucker. However, there is no homogeneous and complete system of theory. The terminological definitions, features and functions are by no means in consensus, since different researchers may approach them from different perspectives.Bearing this in mind, the author begins the thesis with a general description of DMs. Through a detailed account of the related terminologies, functions, subcategory elements as well as theoretical framework on the studies of DMs, the author aims to offer a new interpretation for DMs from the perspective of communication.Then, inspired by Halliday's three metafunctions of discourse, the author suggests that DMs have three metafunctions as well, namely, the function of discourse organization, the function of context adaptability and the function of interpersonal interaction. After a detailed account of the three metafunctions, the thesis attempts to analyze two specific DMs within the framework. Based on the analysis of the syntactic patterns and pragmatic functions of you know in English and nizhidao in Chinese, the thesis concludes that the employment of DMs in everyday communication is a universal property of language and they have similar metafunctions as well. They are indispensable devices to guarantee the fluency and effectiveness of daily communication.