Discourse Marker But In Communication

But, a 'problematic expression' (Blakemore, 2002: 98), has a relatively high frequency in discourse. So far it has been explored from a variety of theoretical approaches, mainly semantics and pragmatics. In terms of semantics, three buts are distinguished: denial of expectation, correction and compensation (Abraham, 1979). However, pragmatists, such as Blakemore (1987, 2000, 2002), Fraser (1996, 2005), Iten (2000), generally agree that but encodes procedural meaning and indicates that the clause it introduces is to be processed as a denial. Obviously, a semantic account can not explain the motivation of utilizing but. And pragmatically, although the previous researches can enlighten us with the motivation of utilizing but, it is based on the utterance interpretation. Few people dwell upon it in the view of utterance production or comprehensively and complimentarily discuss the motivation of utilizing but and its role in utterance interpretation. Researches on the above aspects can help us to reveal the people's cognitive psychological trace.Thus backed up with empirical evidence, proceeding from the communicative process, this thesis strives to unravel the mental behavior of controlling when but is employed to organize utterance content and the psychological behavior of cognition during utterance interpretation and further to explore the motivation of utilizing but and its role in utterance interpretation from cognitive-pragmatic perspective, which is based on the research achievements about but on semantics and pragmatics and the theoretical framework drawn from the adaptation theory of Verschueren and the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson.But is not only a cohesive device in discourse, also it can externalize the language user's cognitive psychological trace out to discourse. This thesis proposes that the motivation of utilizing but is that in order to realize the communicative needs, but is used to organize the informative content and convey the speaker's consciousness of denial against its prior utterance content and further expresses his/her communicative intentions. To prove this, in the spirit of adaptation theory, from the perspective of the speaker, metapragmatically the author discusses the function of but as an indicator of speaker's intentions and further reveal the speaker's cognitive psychological trace in controlling of utterance productive form and content when the three buts distinguished by semantics is adopted, namely, the metapragmatic strategies of but: the strategy of denial, the strategy of correction and the strategy of compensation. And then based on relevance theory from the hearer's perspective, the roles that but plus its strategies play are delved into the following: through the contradicting relation established or confirmed by but between the pre- and post utterances and the strategies embodied by but, it is helpful for the hearer to obtain the optimal relevance during inferential process and reduce the hearer's processing effort.Besides the above work done in this thesis, but also catches the attention of the author in terms of the emotions embodied by it and its pragmatic constraint.The analysis of but in this thesis is supported by a range of empirical evidence gleaned from utterance materials and favors a more deep study as well as comprehensive understanding of but.