A Study On The Pragmatic Functions Of The Discourse Markers Of "Big Bang" In The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Discourse Markers exist in our daily communication. They don’t influence the truth value of the utterance, but a good selection of discourse markers can help language users understand and utilize utterance properly and flexibly and maintain a good interpersonal relationship. The scholars at home and abroad study discourse markers systematically and deeply from the perspective of syntax, semantic, cognition and meta-pragmatic awareness,but the study lacks sufficient and general research. Based on the theory of adaptation, this thesis will analyze how the discourse markers in the Big Bang Theory adapt to the contextual correlates and linguistic structural context. In the adaptation to the contextual correlates,the author focuses on the adaptation to communicative context, including the communicators, communicators’ mental, social and physical worlds. In the adaptation to the linguistic structural context, the focus is put on the global coherence and local coherence. Then, the whole process of selecting discourse markers is dynamic, and in this process the communicators act with different degrees of salience. At last,the discourse markers, considered as the signals of starting and transferring topic,information highlighting and repairing, mentality and emotion,play a very important role in the meta-pragmatic awareness.The present study proves that the discourse marker can be considered as not only an important communicative strategy, but also as a useful tool for language users to achieve special goals in communication.