A Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of The Discourse Marker "I Mean" In Friends From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren provides the theoreticalframework to study the pragmatic functions of discourse markers from the cognitive,social and cultural perspectives, which enables the author to explore the functions inutterance production and interpretation more comprehensively. People’s languageusing process is a constantly language choice-making process under differentawarenesses based on language-internal and language-external reasons. In a similarway, the use of discourse marker “I mean” can also be regarded as a languageadaptation process. The present paper makes a qualitative analysis of the adaptationfeatures of the discourse marker “I mean” in the sitcom Friends, with an expectationto contribute to the further study of discourse markers.The use of discourse markers is conducted under the conditions of adapting to thedifferent contexts. The present study analyzes the adaptation of “I mean” to thecommunicative context and linguistic context, based on the data taken from the scriptof Friends. Among them, the writer mainly analyzes the adaptation to thecommunicative context, including the adaptation to the mental world, adaptation tothe social world and adaptation to the physical world. By contrast, the linguisticcontextual adaptation analysis just involves the contextual cohesion aspect. Throughthe analysis and study, the author summarizes the pragmatic functions of the discoursemarker “I mean” in the sitcom Friends, including enhancing interpersonal function,mitigating face-threat function, information repairing function, reminding function,supplementing and explaining function and transforming function. The present studyproves that the discourse marker “I mean” can be used as an importantcommunicative strategy, and can be considered as an advantageous tool for the language users to achieve special communicative goals under necessarycircumstances.