A Pragmatic Analysis Of Discourse Markers In The 2008 U.S. Presidential Debates

Since the 1970s, there has been an increasing interest in discourse markers (DMs) in language production and comprehension. Researches on DMs, though rich and fruitful, are far from being homogeneous and complete. The studies on DMs have been done under more than twenty overlapping labels, showing that different researchers hold different opinions and offer different explanations for the nature of DMs. There are three main approaches to the study of DMs, namely, the coherence-based functional approach, the grammatical-pragmatic approach, and the relevance-based cognitive-pragmatic approach. All of them play a very important role in the explanation of utterance production and interpretation. However, few of them have provided a psychological explanation for the usage of the DMs in utterance production and comprehension.With the development of cognitive science, there have been more studies on the functions of DMs in utterance comprehension and interpretation. The present thesis aims to analyze the pragmatic functions of DMs in a special genre—the debate on television. By applying Levelt's (1989) message processor model, it discusses the typical DMs used in the 2008 U.S. presidential debates and their pragmatic function in the debating speeches produced by the two senators, and hence formulates the patterns of discourse development based on the functions and features of DMs in the specific genre of debate.Chapter One provides an overview of the thesis, including the purpose, the background, and significance of the study. In Chapter Two, the author makes a general review on the multi-terminology and classification of DMs, and then generalizes the different approaches to DMs based on different theoretical frameworks. And then, it introduces the feature and basic study of debates.Chapter Three introduces the theoretical background concerning about the cognitive principle of relevance theory and Levelt's information processor model.Chapter Four proposes the research questions and introduces the method used in the analysis of the data collected from the 2008 U. S. presidential debates.Chapter Five generalizes the features of the DMs used in the debates and makes a new classification of the DMs in the genre of debates. And then it takes a tentative account of the psychological motivation for using the DMs in the production process.Chapter Six is a summary of the whole paper, which contains the major achievements of the study, the limitations, and the prospects for future studies. And some implications are also presented.