A Study On Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Marker Well Based On Relevance-adaptation Model

Discourse markers are widely used in verbal communication that a good command ofemploying and understanding discourse markers not only helps us to process communicationsmoothly but also assists us achieve coherence in discourse. Since Schiffrin’s book DiscourseMarkers was published, a large number of linguist scholars have taken great interest in themand made great contributions. Among those discourse markers, well has became one of themost important members and the subject of a large quantity of research work because of thehigher frequency of its occurrence in both written and oral English. Generally speaking,linguists study discourse marker well from different angles: coherence theory,grammatical-pragmatic theory, relevance theory, adaptation theory and so on. Therelevance-adaptation model regards the use of utterance as the process of mutual adaptationbetween contextual elements and linguistic ways, so this research uses relevance-adaptationmodel to analyze functions of discourse marker well from both the speaker’s utteranceproduction and the hearer’s interpretation. A lot of practice research proves that this newmodel of relevance-adaptation can describe and explain the whole process of communicationmore effectively from both the production and interpretation of language.This research takes examples from the natural corpus—Corpus of ContemporaryAmerican English as research resources, and analyzes pragmatic functions of discoursemarker well in the spoken English. The Corpus of Contemporary American English is thelargest balanced English corpus which is free for English learners and researchers to useonline. And it is also a good window for English learners to understand and observe thechange and the use of American English. Among the chosen500well, there are395well usedas discourse markers, and the other105well are used as content words. These395well appearin this research cover six kinds of pragmatic functions: as a contemplation marker; as acoherence-achieving marker; as an insufficiency marker; as a turn-taking marker; as aface-threat mitigating marker; as a correcting marker. The aim of this research is to helppeople understand pragmatic functions of discourse marker well in the spoken English.What’s more, it proves that the new relevance-adaptation model can interpret discoursemarker well better. Meanwhile, it improves the ability of using discourse marker well inlistening, speaking, reading, and writing.