A Relevance-theoretic Study On The Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Marker You Know In The Big Bang Theory

People frequently use words or phrases like oh, well, so, therefore, after all, I mean, you know in daily communication, which attracted both domestic and foreign scholars’attention to this phenomenon. Researchers refer to these words or phrases as discourse markers and conducted researches on them. Generally speaking, their researches are conducted from three perspectives:the coherence-based perspective represented by Schiffrin, the grammatical-pragmatic perspectiveby Fraser and the cognitive-pragmatic perspective by Sperber&Wilson. Through analysis and comparison, we find the cognitive-pragmatic approach is more convincing in explaining the pragmatic functions of discourse markers. Therefore, the author adopts it as the theoretical framework of the present study.At home, researches on you know as a discourse marker are rare, especially in native English-speaking environment. This motivated the author to conduct the current research to analyze the pragmatic functions of discourse marker you know with the quantitative and the qualitative methods in an American sitcom The Big Bang Theory (Season1-Season4) so as to test the powerful interpretability of relevance theory.Chapter one serves as the introduction including the research purpose and significance, research questions and the organization of the thesis. Chapter two primarily reviews the previous researches of discourse markers and the three prevailing approaches to them. Meanwhile, Chapter two provides comparison and analysis of these three approaches. Chapter three presents the theoretical framework and research methodology of the present thesis. The main body of this thesis, Chapter four, analyzes the pragmatic functions of discourse marker you know in natural language environment from the relevance-theoretic perspective. The last chapter comes to a conclusion of the present thesis, including major findings, pedagogical implications as well as limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research.Through the analysis of the pragmatic functions of discourse marker you know in native English-speaking environment, the powerful interpretability of relevance theory in explaining the pragmatic functions of discourse markers is to be proved. Meanwhile, the thesis will broaden the previous researches on discourse markers and attract more scholars’attention to study discourse markers, thus facilitates the development of discourse markers and helps Chinese of English learners better understand and use discourse markers.