A Relevance-theoretical Study On Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Marker Anyway In Desperate Housewives

Discourse markers are indispensable linguistic components in dailycommunication. It directs or limits the hearer’s interpretation towards speaker’sutterances. The correct use of discourse markers may contribute to bettercommunication between interlocutors and promote the interlocution going well.Discourse markers have always been the object of study for scholars at home andabroad. However, anyway, as a very commonly used linguistic expression, has notbeen studied widely. This thesis tries to study and analyze discourse marker anywaysystematically from the perspective of Relevance Theory. There are two questionswhich need to be answered:1. What pragmatic functions does discourse markeranyway bear in Desperate Housewives on the basis of the Relevance Theory?2. Howdo these pragmatic functions of discourse marker anyway realize in this TV opera?The linguistic data mainly come from the American hit soap opera DesperateHousewives which includes eight seasons totally. The linguistic materials aredownloaded from two websites: http://www.shooter.cn and http://www.yyets.com, andcollected into Microsoft Word2003. According to Fraser’s classification towardsDMs and previous studies on DM anyway, I classify and encode pragmatic functionsof anyway which appear in this TV opera. On the basis of quantitative and qualitativeanalyses, I count the number of each pragmatic function in the TV opera. Connectingthe results of analyzing anyway with the Relevance Theory, I conduct a systematicstudy on each pragmatic function of anyway.Through studying, it is easy to notice that discourse marker anyway being a topicchange marker, the elaborative marker, the contrastive marker, the closing marker andthe additive marker takes up a large proportion, while it takes up a small proportion asa correcting marker and the inferential marker, which indicates that people tend toexpress topic change, strengthen previous feelings or attitudes, elaborate oppositemeanings with prior utterances and end a conversation by means of anyway in dailycommunication. However, they seldom employ discourse marker anyway to correctprevious utterance meanings or infer intended meanings of the speaker. In the end, this thesis proposes some implications for studying discourse markeranyway and point out the shortcomings of this study.