A Corpus-based Study Of Discourse Marker So:a Pragmatic Perspective

Discourse Markers are widely used in verbal communication, which influence theunderstanding of an utterance or constrain the comprehension of a discourse. A good commandand understanding of discourse markers can help the interlocutors not only to achieve thediscourse coherence but also fulfill a successful communication. The research on the discoursemarkers is worthwhile and valuable. More and more linguists turn their eye on the field andmake an extensive research on discourse markers. They have studied it from different points ofview and achieved a great success. However, compared with the flourishing studies of discoursemarkers such as well, but, you know, so, as a discourse marker, doesn’t attract enough attention.This thesis aims to explore so from the pragmatic perspective and attempts to address thefollowing two questions:(1) What kind of pragmatic functions does the discourse marker so perform in thecommunications?(2) What implications of the research results for English teaching and learning?In order to answer the questions, the thesis adopts Relevance Theory as the theoreticalframework to analyze the discourse marker so. Relevance Theory, put forward by Sperber andWilson, is considered as the best explanatory power for discourse markers. According to thetheory, human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance. And thecontextual effects have a great influence on the interpretation. The goal of communication is toacquire optimal information through minimal relevance. In order to obtain maximum cognitiveeffect with a minimum effort, it’s beneficial for people to focus on the most relevantinformation. Discourse markers are one of the linguistic devices which serve as constraints onproduction and interpretation of utterance. Under the framework, the functions of discoursemarker so could be presented.The study takes language data from the British National Corpus. The use of corpus canenlarge a number of language facts from the macroscopic angle and make the investigationmore objective and comprehensive. The author selects460examples at random from BritishNational Corpus and processes the data by statistical instruments. Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data, the pragmatic functions of so is analyzed.It is found that there are six kinds of pragmatic functions of so as a discourse marker,namely, the transition marker, the turn-taking marker, the inference marker, the emotion marker,the mitigation marker and the contemplation marker. People apply so most frequently to givethe hearers hints to infer the communicative intention, and attract hearers’ attention. By using soof these functions, the hearer can infer the speaker’s intention, find out the conversationalimplicature and make a successful communication.As the discourse markers play a vital role in communication, they accordingly will give ussome implications for English learning and teaching. The proper use of discourse markers canhelp to facilitate the interpretation of utterance and make a great contribution to the successfulcommunication. As for English learners, it is better to value and study discourse markers so asto have a better control of the language. The findings of the research provide not only theimplications for English teaching and learning, but also pave the way for the researchers toconduct further studies of discourse markers.