The Functions And Motivation Of Discourse Markers In Discourse Interpretation-A Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

Discourse makers (DMs) are those expressions indicating the way to expand a discourse, not describing it and revealing the pragmatic functions at the discourse level, usually no grammatical confining.Compared with the analysis of other linguistic phenomena to show the linguistic competence of human beings, the arousing interest into DMs among the academic staff is in accordance with the uprising of the linguistic turn to realize the significance of performance and the demand to unveil the mysterious elements above the sentence level. In the past two decades of years after the publication of the great book Discourse Markers, the first monograph on DMs written by Debora Schiffrin, it is generally acknowledged by scholars that there are three branches of DMs research. However, the research of DMs in discourse interpretation is not seriously calculated, So, the author narrowly concentrates on two points in this paper: the exact role of DMs in the perspective of discourse interpretation and the motivation of certain DMs existing in discourse.The theory adopted in this paper is RT and the methodology is deductive, qualitative and hypothetical. Confined to the theory and methodology, the author supposes that the functions of DMs in discourse interpretation are constraining and indicating and the motivation of them could be illustrated by the principle of the optimal relevance.Based on the doctrines of RT and the latest theories of meanings in pragmatics, this paper firstly points out that the existence of DMs has an effect on both level of explicatures and implicatures. After that, the author switches to work out the process of inferring implicatures in the scope of RT, which is separated into three steps, the ostensive behaviors of the speaker as preparations, the contextual effects shared by both of the speaker and hearer and the inference of the hearer. Besides, the tentative to know the motivation of utilizing certain DMs is another topic. Through the analysis, the author makes a contribution in those three aspects:1, DMs is used as an indicator to predict the utterances and work out the intention of the speaker by the hearer the moment they help him to find out the optimal relevance;2, The indicating function of DMs mainly happens at the address of logical entries of central systems in the process of inference;3, Certain DMs are necessary in the perspective of discourse interpretation as a filter to select potential coherence relations.