A Functional Approach To Pragmatic Markers In Verbal Communication

Pragmatic markers are so pervasively used in daily language that the proper use and interpretation of them consist of a considerable part of pragmatic or communicative competence. The study of this linguistic phenomenon thus bears both theoretic and practical significance. In the past ten years, the study of pragmatic markers turned into a growing industry in linguistics. However, researches on PMs, though rich and fruitful, are far from being homogeneous and complete, that is, the study of PMs does not constitute a unitary approach.While these researches have investigated pragmatic markers from different perspectives, thus causing unavoidable disagreements regarding such fundamental issues as their terminology, definition, classification and functions, it is generally accepted that such expressions do not contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance. The fact that taking a pragmatic marker away from the host discourse segment it is attached to does not affect the sentence's grammaticality judgments 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 (Schourup, 1999).Through reviewing previous studies of PMs, we argue that the most influential approaches to PMs include coherence-based perspective, syntactic-pragmatic perspective, cognitive-pragmatic perspective. On the basis of the previous studies on PMs, this thesis attempts to combine the three prominent analytical framework in the study of the pragmatic multi-functions of PMs in verbal communication, aiming at more comprehensive descriptions and explanations of PMs' functions. Of course, in the present study, the theoretical emphasis is put on the multi-facets of interpersonal communication and on the contributions of pragmatic markers as linguistic and contextual clues to meaning production and interpretation in interaction, and also on the multifunctionality of pragmatic markers, which are elusive in meaning and ready for new senses or functions in interactive discourse. Then some vital issues relevant to PMs are explained, including interpretative orientation of PMs; inference of explicatures and implicatures and PMs; conceptual and procedural meaning of PMs and PMs' constraints on implicature. On the basis of the preceding analyses, we put forward three main functions of PMs in interactive communication, that is, PMs function as textual management, social management and metalinguistic monitor.In addition, by virtue of cases study, the thesis provides a more comprehensive account of PMs' properties and multi-functions, confirming the assumption that the use and functions of pragmatic markers are closely related to the multiple goals on different discoursal levels in interpersonal communication. In sum, PMs serve to achieve discourse coherence, organize information, enhance interpersonal relationship and index communicative strategies as well. The meanings and functions of pragmatic markers are constrained by the contextual factors involved in communicative situations.