Arelevance-Cognitive Study Of And As A Discourse Marker

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of discoursemarkers, which are mainly dealt in syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Discoursemarkers are some words or phrases such as ok, well, so, and, you know and I mean,which only express the procedural meaning and do not add to the truth condition ofthe discourse. However, little work has been done on discourse marker and.The present study is conducted with Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber&Wilson. RT claims that communication is a dynamic process of searching for optimalrelevance, which provides the motivations for using discourse markers. It is anautomatic tendency for speakers to produce utterances with a guarantee of optimalrelevance sot that the hearer could interpret the speaker’s communication intentionwith minimum processing effort. For that purpose, the speaker would frequentlyemploy some discourse markers as the ostensive stimuli to indicate the hearer thedirection of understanding the utterance.The overall aim of the present study is to analyse the pragmatic functions of DMand, and to classify the usages of DM and based on their pragmatic functions. Inorder to reach the aim, this study draws on the data taken from the fiction HarryPotter and the Deathly Hallows with the aid of Antconc3.2.1w to obtain thefrequencies and distributions of different usages of DM and.With the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collected data in the novelHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it is found that DM and could be employed asan important linguistic device to constrain the hearer’s inferential ability and guide thedirection of interpretation of utterances by attracting the hearer’s attention andsignaling the logical relation between utterances. Thus, the hearer can adjust theircognitive environment to capture the speaker’s communicative intention withminimum processing effort. In communication, DM and could mark the sequence ofutterances, actions and thought, smooth over the discontinuity in discourse, mark theturn and express the speaker’s attitudes and emotions in conversation. The usages of DM and are classified into several groups: sequence marker, repair marker, contrastmarker, delay marker, turn-taking marker, attitude marker and comment marker.This study gains insight into the nature of DM and based on the cognitive study.In view of lack of research on DM and, the study is an attempt to fill the gap byconducting a corpus-based study. Therefore, this study could not only help Englishlearners to better understand the usages of DM and, but also add valuable analysis tothe literature of discourse markers.