An Analysis Of Discourse Markers In Dialogues From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Discourse markers are everywhere in daily language using, as a universal phenomena, they are usually used as important communicative strategies to realize the communicative goals. Due to the complexity of their classifications and disunity of their definitions, the researches on discourse markers also emerge multi-angles. The discourse markers are not only a kind of phenomenon, but a kind of communication means, they can link the former with the later discourses, however, if take off the discourse marker from its attached discourse, it does not affect the grammaticality of the discourse or its propositional contents, but affects its pragmatic appropriateness and interpersonal relationships in social level. This fact shows that the using of discourse markers is not required by syntactic or semantic, but from the requirement of pragmatic aspects. Therefore, study on discourse markers from pragmatic perspective has important theoretical value and practical significance.This thesis aims to study how characters choose different discourse markers in communication to achieve the communicative goals successfully. This study takes Linguistic Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren as theoretical foundation, and the context correlates of adaptability as the analytical framework; collects the discourse markers appear in dialogues in Pride and Prejudice as data and carries out quantitative and qualitative analysis on them; studies adaptive aims to choose discourse markers for communicators, and hopes that it can contribute to further pragmatic studies on discourse markers.From detailed analysis, this thesis gets some major findings as follows:firstly, through analyzing the data, it can be found that the choosing of discourse markers is a dynamic process and need to be negotiated in communication. As one of language structure, discourse markers also possess the three properties of language:variability, negotiability and adaptability, which enable speakers to make choices; secondly, people's choice of discourse markers is governed by their conscious or unconscious metapragmatic awareness. They choose from a variety of discourse markers with strategies in order to adapt to certain contexts, which includes linguistic context, mental world, social world, and physical world. Thus the speaker can fulfill the goals of successful communication. Discourse markers are considered as a bridge to link the segments before and after them especially in literary works; thirdly, through statistically analyzing, in novel, different figures choose different discourse markers in different contexts, and the frequency of using discourse marker is also different. From the analysis, it can be found that the context is the most affected factors for people to choose discourse markers, and what discourse markers people choose and the frequency of using them can represent different characters in the novel; finally, from the detailed analysis of discourse markers in dialogues in Pride and Prejudice within Adaptation Theory, it finds that discourse markers can be used as adaptation strategies to adapt to linguistic context, mental world, social world, and physical world. In other words, the discourse markers can be used to adapt to characters'emotion, intention, personality, and to adapt social convention, politeness, time and space, and other factors of context to achieve the goals of communication.