A Study On The Discourse Markers In Gossip Girl Based On The Adaptation-Relevance Model

This thesis studies pragmatic functions of discourse markers in Gossip Girl under the framework of the adaptation-relevance model. Furthermore, the paper studies the production and comprehension of discourse markers in Gossip Girl. Discourse markers are a common linguistic phenomenon in daily communication. Since Discourse Markers written by Schiffrin was published, this linguistic phenomenon has drawn many scholars" attention and the achievements have been accomplished. They study discourse markers through three perspectives which are coherence perspective, the grammatical-pragmatic perspectives, and the relevance perspective. However, they all have advantages and disadvantages to study discourse markers. Based on previous researches, a new Adaptation-Relevance Model is put forward by Ran Yongping, which concerns both the utterance production and interpretation. In the meanwhile, it contains the constantly seeking optimal relevance and adaptive relevant context as well.Based on the previous achievements, the author collects the data of discourse markers in Gossip Girl. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approach is adopted to study discourse markers with Adaptation-Relevance Model. The purpose of this thesis is to study discourse markers and research how discourse markers serve as their pragmatic functions in a specific context. With the help of adaptation-relevance model, the author analyzes the functions of each classification of discourse markers and the different functions in different context. Moreover, the author describes that native speakers how to use discourse markers to achieve the communicative purpose. Firstly, through studying the functions of discourse markers in Gossip Girl, the author finds that the adaptation-relevance model is very suitable to explain the discourse markers. Secondly, elaborative discourse markers, inferential discourse markers and conversational discourse markers have more frequency than contrastive discourse markers, emphasis discourse markers and self-assessment discourse markers. At last, the author finds that people often use self-assessment discourse markers among their family members. And when they want to refuse other invitations, they often use oh, well in the beginning of utterance instead of but which is not noticed in other researches.All in all, the author hopes this study will make contributions to discourse markers study as well as expand the application in the field of this model.