A Relevance-theoretic Study Of Discourse Marker "and" In Modern Family

In our daily interaction and communication, discourse markers tend to be an increasingly common language phenomenon. The discourse markers refer to those small words or phrases, such as anyway, because, oh, or, well, so, and, now, then, you know, I think, you see and so on. They only have the application meaning and don’t increase the true-value meaning of sentences. In recent years, discourse markers are one of the main research objects of researchers at home and abroad. Discourse marker and is the language expression which will be usually used, but has not been paid much attention in the previous studies.The present thesis takes the perspective of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, and combines some analysis methods of Blakemore about the pragmatic functions of discourse marker and.The present research objective is to analyze the pragmatic functions of discourse marker and in American TV series of Modern Family to categorize these pragmatic functions with the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, and to conclude the final occurrence frequency of every pragmatic function of the discourse marker and. Based on the above data, the author makes a systematic analysis of the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker and. The corpus of the present thesis comes from the real scripts of American TV series of Modern Family. According to the collected data, the present thesis aims to answer the following three research questions:1. How many pragmatic functions of discourse marker and are there in Modern Family under the theoretical framework of Relevance theory?2. Under a certain pragmatic background, how does discourse marker and perform its main role in the cognitive environment?3. Which pragmatic function of discourse marker and is the most frequently used in the scripts of American TV series of Modern Family?The present research has found that there are main six pragmatic functions of discourse markers and in Modern Family:1. Continuation marker; 2. Coordinator in text construction; 3. Delay marker; 4. Turn-taking marker; 5. Self-correction marker; 6. Attitude marker. Interpreting utterance is a cognitive process. It is necessary for interlocutors to understand each other’s cognitive environment in order to achieve successful communication. The application of discourse marker will help the communicators to better understand the utterances and make the conversation go successfully. The study has also found that three main pragmatic functions share the most proportion. Continuation marker is made up of 23 percent, coordinator in text construction takes up 26 percent and attitude marker turns to be 21 percent. In other cases, there are also three other pragmatic functions:delay marker is 11 percent, turn-taking marker turns to be 10 percent and self-correction marker is made up of 9 percent. In one’s daily communication, the majority of people usually use the discourse marker and to indicate the pragmatic meaning of discourse continuation. And the discourse marker can also be used to connect the two words or sentences, and also expresses the attitude of speakers in one’s social expressions.Therefore, this research has four aspects of significance. Firstly, the present thesis enriches the study of the discourse marker and in corpus, and provides more research material in discourse analysis. Secondly, through the presentation of the findings in the present thesis, and combing the application of Relevance Theory and its relevant theories, we can better demonstrate the powerful explanation of Relevance Theory and relevance methods. Thirdly, according to the discourse materials collected, English learners or English amateurs can better understand discourse or context which will make the mutual interaction and communication more smooth and effectively. Finally, with the help of discourse markers, speakers will extremely state their utterances so as to make the listeners spare the minimum efforts to understand their real intentions.