A Pragmatic Study Of The Discourse Marker You Know In Friends

Discourse Markers, such as well, oh, you know, you see, I mean, that is to say, in other words, as I said in English and你知道,大家知道,笔者的意思是,也就是说inChinese and so on, are very common discourse elements. Instead of influencing the propositional content of an utterance, discourse markers mainly affect the construction and understanding of it, hence it's both theoretically and practically significant to do research on discourse markers.In the 1970s, with the establishment and development of pragmatics and discourse analysis, many linguists began their studies of discourse markers, such as Van Dijk (1979), Levinson (1983), Zwicky (1985), Schiffrin (1987), Redeker (1991), Blakemore (1987, 1992), Fraser (1997), to name only a few. These scholars mainly study discourse markers from three different perspectives embodied by the coherence theory, the syntactic-pragmatic theory and the relevance theory.Based on the previous studies, this paper takes the discourse marker you know in Friends (Season 10) as an example and analyzes its pragmatic functions from the perspective of relevance theory. In addition, the present study also makes a brief introduction to the discourse marker you know in larger prefabricated structures and its functions. It is observed that the discourse marker you know in Friends (Season 10) is mainly used as a reminding marker, a repairing marker, a stalling marker, an introducing-new-information marker and a waiting-response marker. And the discourse marker you know in larger prefabricated structures is used to get the hearer's attention, maintain the topic or change the topic. As a result, discourse markers do not influence the propositional content of an utterance, but are used to perform many pragmatic functions, such as indicating the speaker's communicative intentions.