A Study Of Pragmatic Functions Of DM Well Based On Relevance Theory

Discourse markers are those widely used"little words or phrases"such as well, oh, I mean, you know etc. With the development of pragmatics since 1970s, a large number of linguists have paid their attention to the study of discourse markers. More and more scholars both at home and abroad like Schourup, Levinson, Zwicky, Schiffrin, Redeker, Fraser, Blakemore, He Ziran, Ran Yongping, and He Zhaoxiong have taken great interest in discourse markers and made great contributions. Discourse markers usually do not affect the grammatical judgment of a sentence but does contribute to the pragmatic appropriateness. In other words, they are pragmatically motivated but not syntactically or semantically oriented. That is, they contribute to the procedural meaning rather than the conceptual meaning. Generally speaking, these linguists study discourse markers mainly from three perspectives. One is from the perspective of discourse coherence and their semantic features represented by Schiffrin(1987), and the second is syntactic-pragmatic approach conducted by Fraser(1999), and the third is from relevance theory represented by Blakemore. Relevance theory, with its notions of procedural encodings, contextual effects and processing efforts, provides the necessary analytical framework to account for the pragmatic functions of discourse markers in terms of their constraints on the inferential process in utterance interpretation.Since the relevance theory is considered to be relatively more reasonable than other theories in interpreting the pragmatic functions of discourse markers, this thesis adopts the relevance theory as its theoretical framework. Among all these discourse markers, well is the most frequently studied, and most of scholars at home have already done a lot researches on literature, translation skills, listening and reading skills to demonstrate its functions. This thesis attempts to research on the pragmatic functions of well in direct conversations based on the relevance theory approach supported by well in two popular TV serials: Desperate Housewives and Friends. Six pragmatic functions have been included for discussion: correcting marker, coherence-achieving marker, contemplation marker, mitigation marker, turn-taking marker, and insufficiency marker. This thesis aims to help people command more knowledge about the pragmatic functions of DM well in English language, and finally unravel some implications of discourse markers for English language teaching and learning, thus producing and understanding English language better.