A Relevance-theoretic Study Of The Discourse Marker Actually In Friends

The study of discourse Markers becomes a new topic in the research of conversation analysis and pragmatics in recent years. In China, little work has been done on the discourse marker actually. This article takes the script of an American soap opera Friends as data and analyzes the functions of pragmatic actually in it. It attempts to reveal the characteristics of actually used by English native speakers, enrich the study of discourse markers and prove the powerful interpretability of relevance theory.This thesis, with the support of quantitative and qualitative analyses, makes a study of the DM actually used by native speakers. Through the analysis of the DM actually, the author find that actually could help hearers achieve optimal relevance and contribute to the global coherence of the whole discourse.This study proves that RT functions quite well in explaining and exploring DMs such as actually in the English language. It is hoped that the study would shed a light on the study of similar linguistic items and the learning of foreign languages like English for Chinese learners.