A Pragmatic Study Of Discourse Markers In Downton Abbey

Discourse markers have attracted an increasing interest for linguists in languageproduction and comprehension since1970s. Many researchers holding differentopinions have contributed a lot to study of discourse markers, and innumerablearticles have been published during decades. However, few of researchers have takenfunction analysis of discourse markers on television drama script corpus.Based on the Relevance Theory, this thesis discussed functions of discoursemarkers in a pragmatic way. There are five chapters of thesis, including introduction,literature review, theoretical foundation, function analysis and conclusion. ChapterOne introduces the research status of discourse markers, including background,significance and objectives. Chapter two contains the previous studies of discoursemarkers both at home and abroad, studies of dramatic literature and backgroundintroduction of corpus. Nowadays the three main approaches on discourse markersresearches in pragmatic field are coherence-based approach, the grammatical-pragmatic approach and the relevance-theoretic approach, and each one give theirexplanations about discourse markers on its terms, definitions and classifications.This thesis is influenced by the relevance-theoretic approach and did theoreticalfoundation on chapter three. It discusses several main points of relevance theory onits assertions, including ostensive-inferential model, informative intention andcommunicative intention, conditions and principles of relevance theory. Under itsinspiration the author divided functions of discourse markers into three types byfusing quantitative study with qualitative study together to analyze the representativesof over3000discourse markers in the script in chapter four. The first one isostensive-inferential functions, discourse markers are being used to indicate andexpress the real intentions, which includes indicating the intention of explanation,reminding, compromise and hesitation. And the second one is contextual function,which means a speaker can decode information with intention and make sure thehearer can choose optimal relevance with discourse markers, and then infer a furthernew information to help the hearer to understand the original intention, including tobegin, to change or to end a topic, to make a supplement, to show a contradiction, toshow a causation and to reach a conclusion. The last one is emotional function, which means the speaker tends to deliver the implied information with feelings oremotions by using discourse markers, this thesis discusses five emotional functions ofdiscourse markers: to show surprise, panic, excitement, depression and anger.As a conclusion, this thesis believes that discourse markers have a quitereasonable function in explaining and demonstrating characterization, conflict plotsand atmosphere in the script, furthermore some possible improvements could bemade for the use of discourse markers in television dramatic literature studies, whichmay light on further studies in these fields.