Pragmatic Functions Of The Discourse Marker So And Its Translation In Friends

Discourse markers such as oh, well, so, after all, you know,etc are so widelyused in daily communication. Since Halliday & Hasan’s Cohesion in English andSchiffrin’s Discourse Markers were published, lots of researchers have contributed alot to the study of discourse markers. The study of discourse markers is of greattheoretical value and practical significance. With the development of pragmatics,studies on discourse markers have been growing rapidly and scholars are inclined tostudy discourse markers from the pragmatic perspective. Although scholars havestudied a lot on discourse markers, comparatively few researchers make analysesthrough combining pragmatics with translation study. Therefore, this paper focuses onthis point.So as a discourse marker can present multi pragmatic functions in differentcontexts. It is not semantically oriented or does not add anything to the propositionalcontent of an utterance, but has plenty of pragmatic effects. In this thesis, the authoranalyzes the pragmatic functions and translations of so which based on the relevancetheory proposed by Sperber&Wilson. The author selects the popular sitcom Friends asthe data and makes detailed analyses of the discourse marker so. And the author findsthat discourse marker so plays a great role in daily communication in the sitcom.This thesis consists of four chapters in addition to an introduction and aconclusion. Chapter one is literature review which reviews the previous studies ofdiscourse markers both abroad and at home. Different researchers put differentemphases so they give different definitions to the term discourse marker. Generallythere are three approaches applied to the study of discourse markers, thecoherence-based approach which represented by Schiffrin and Redeker; thegrammatical-pragmatic approach represented by Fraser; the pragmatic-cognitiveapproach represented by Blakemore and Rouchota. Discourse markers help to createcohesion and coherence in a specified text by establishing a relationship between thevarious ideas that are uttered within the text. The author also demonstrates thepurpose and significance of this paper. Chapter two presents the theory foundation—relevance theory. In this chapter, the author discusses some importantpoints of relevance theory, which is proposed by Sperber and Wilson, it is mainlyabout the exploring of human communication from the cognitive perspective whichincludes the human communication, contextual effects, ostensive-inferentialcommunication and the principles of relevance theory. What’s more the authorpresents the pragmatic functions of discourse markers. According to relevance theory,the hearer is permitted to understand every utterance with the smallest effort and themost accessible context that manifestly produces enough contextual effects. Chapterthree and chapter four are the data analyses. The method is to collect detailedexamples of so in Friends (season 10), and group them into categories and analyzethem according to their functions in the given examples. The pragmatic functions ofso can be divided into two groups, the contextual function and the emotional function.When so implies contextual function it can indicate as the topic initiator, topic shiftingmarker, conclusion marker and continuer marker and so on, the emotional functionsimplied by so can express surprise, dissatisfaction, irony and so on. Chapter fourdiscusses the translation of so. It cannot always be translated to“所以”or“那么”.The translator should cope with the condition flexibly in accordance with the differentpragmatic functions in different contexts and find out the suitable Chinese terms torealize pragmatic equivalence. In the meantime, the translator should consider theoriginal writer’s intention and the target language readers’cognitive context andexpectation. Only by this way can the translation be successful.Although the thesis is just limited to daily conversations in a sitcom, the researchcan contribute a little to discourse marker studies.