A Study Of Lexical Bundle "You Know What" In Friends

Nowadays, more and more scholars pay attention to lexical bundles. With thedevelopment of corpus linguistics, it is found that there are large quantities of fixed orsemi-fixed expressions stored in human brain. Lexical bundles are the smallest unitsof meaning and form that can accomplish the grammatical, discourse and pragmaticfunctions and they play a very important role in promoting the fluency of languageproduction. Lexical bundles can reduce processing time and effort and supportcommunication. As lexical bundle is a very interesting language phenomenon and itoccurs in natural discourse, this thesis does an analysis about the lexical bundle "youknow what" in Friends.Based on the former study, this thesis will do an analysis of "you know what" inFriends to classify its pragmatic functions according to Moon’s, Biber’s andNattinger’s views. The three scholars have their own opinions about the pragmaticfunctions of lexical bundles in discourse. This thesis will use the free softwareAntConc3.2.1to retrieve "you know what" in Friends, by using this software, theauthor finds it occurs in the script of Season9for86times. Klerk thinks there is ameasurement of realistic discourse in soap operas. The language in Friends is anatural language spoken in daily life by groups of native English speakers. Theirconversation can be seen as the suitable material for English learning and research.This thesis is trying to do the analysis that no one has done before and it willanalyze the pragmatic functions and its different functions in different forms. Basedon the research, there are five functions of "you know what":1. pragmatic function;2.educing the information focus;3. fillers when it follows discourse markers;4. forminglarge units of discourse;5. polite device. Pragmatic function can be divided asevaluative, modal and organizational function. In order to test and verify previousresearching results, a case study of "you know what" in Friends is made. Finally，thethesis summarizes the main findings, discusses the implications and limitations of thestudy, and puts forward some suggestions for further research in the future.