A Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of You Know In The Three American Sitcoms As A Discourse Marker

Discourse Markers (DM) are indispensable in daily communication, and it is common in people’s daily conversations. In daily conversations, the discourse markers have constraints on the construction and comprehension of language through various ways so as to achieve the communicative purpose. Research on discourse markers began in1970s, and developed rapidly from1980s. In recent years, domestic and foreign studies of discourse markers have been unceasingly increased and have made remarkable achievements.In1976, American psychologist J.H.Flavel first explained the concept of meta-cognition in his book Cognitive Development. Later, people began to pay more attention to meta-cognition and the study of it was unceasingly thorough and careful. The essence of meta-cognition is the self-awareness and self-regulation of his/her own cognitive activities. The individual actively monitors and controls his/her own cognitive activities in the process of cognitive activity, so as to reach the predetermined goal.American sitcoms has a large number of audiences, especially there are a lot of discourse markers appeared in the communication of the characters, of which the discourse marker you know is one of the most common expressions. Many scholars have conducted research on the discourse markers in the literary works, TV interviews, public speech, but seldom scholars focus on the discourse markers in the American sitcoms. On the basis of the previous studies, the author finds out the new breakthrough point to analyze the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker you know in the three famous American sitcoms Friends (Season10), The Big Bang Theory (Season6) and2broke girls (Season2) from the perspective of meta-cognition. With the combination of the qualitative methods and the quantitative methods, this study aims to help people understand the cognitive process of the production and comprehension of a speech, and better understand the pragmatic meaning of the discourse markers beyond their syntactic meaning and semantic meaning.There are four major findings of the present study: Firstly, human speech production and communication is a cognitive process. According to the meta-cognition theory, the speaker has the ability of meta-cognitive monitoring and regulation of this cognitive process. Meta-cognition monitors and regulates the cognitive activities with discourse markers so as to ensure the smooth communication. Secondly, on the basis of the meta-cognition theory, totally ten pragmatic functions have been found in these three American sitcoms, namely(1) to govern turn:you know function to govern turn mainly from three aspects:turn-taking, turn-holding and turn-relinquishing, i.e., you know can supervise the speaker to start, end and keep the turn.(2) to adjust interpersonal relationship:the speaker can consciously use you know to mitigate face-threatening act and maintain the interpersonal relationship.(3) as an emotion-indicating marker:the speaker uses you know to indicate his/her feeling and emotion so the hearer will regulate his/her cognitive state.(4) as a further elaborating marker:the speaker uses you know to further elaborate his intention so the hearer can obtain greater cognitive context.(5) to introduce rhetorical questions:the speaker employs you know to introduce rhetorical question so as to draw the hearer’s attention to focus on what he/she would say next.(6) as an information reminder:you know is a communicative strategy to remind the hearer to notice what the speaker says is the general information or information that should know.(7) as an exemplifying marker:when the cognitive context is different, the speaker uses you know to illustrate or make examples of his/her previous utterances.(8) as an advising marker:the speaker employs you know to provide advice and suggestions, then the hearer will make cognitive efforts to obtain the speaker’s intention.(9) to revise information: the speaker may employ you know to revise his information when he/she provides the wrong information or misunderstood by the hearer, the hearer will pay cognitive efforts to obtain the revised information and (10) as a supposing marker:the speaker uses you know to propose a supposition or hypothesis based on the prior information through meta-cognitive thinking. The achievement of these pragmatic functions reveals different personalities of the characters and the development of their relations, which will make the plots become more ups and downs so as to attract more audience. Thirdly, through the statistical analysis, it is found that the most frequently used pragmatic functions of the discourse marker you know in the three American sitcoms are to govern turn, to adjust interpersonal relationship and as an emotion-indicating marker. On the contrary, the least frequently used pragmatic functions are those functions as an advising marker, to revise information and as a supposing marker. In the data collected,409times of you know function as discourse markers, of which255times work as a turn government. The reason for this high frequency is that the turn is the fundamental means to ensure the explicit information between the speaker and the hearer. By using turn government, the speaker stimulates the listener to reason for communicative purpose. Lastly, studies also found that three main contributions these functions may make to the successful communication, namely, to ensure the discourse coherence, to maintain interpersonal relationship, to avoid misunderstandings.Through analyzing the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker you know in the three American sitcoms, this thesis aims to help people better understand the speech features in the American sitcoms and help them more accurately understand the verbal communication activities of the characters in it. The thesis aims to prove the strong interpretability of the meta-cognition theory on analyzing the discourse markers on the pragmatic level. Besides, the study helps people to use the discourse marker you know in a correct way. This thesis is hopefully to make a contribution to the further studies of the discourse markers.