A Discourse Organizing Model Of "Ranhou" As A Discourse Marker

Discourse marker (DM), a hot topic in the field of pragmatics during the recent years, plays a crucial role in understanding the utterances of speakers and makes our own utterances more coherent. It connects sentences and help listeners to understand the intentions of speakers by providing the maximum relevance. The wide use of discourse markers in daily life arouses wide concern of domestic and foreign researchers and linguists who have conducted relevant studies on Chinese DMs and English DMs. It is noticeable that "Ranhou" is more and more frequently and widely used by speakers and even constitutes a speech style recently. It has been studied from semantic, grammatical and pragmatic perspective.The author argues that the utilization of "Ranhou" in discourse is closely related with topics and turns. In this situation, two core questions are raised in the thesis:(1) what are the discourse organizing functions of "Ranhou"? (2) what are the relations between the frequency of "Ranhou" and the users’ age, gender, and geographical locations? Based on the two core questions, the present research tends to set up a discourse organizing model of "Ranhou" through the summarization of predecessors’ researches and attempts to use linguistic materials selected from "Yang Lan One on One" to testify these discourse organizing functions in the model. It aims to give readers a better and comprehensive understanding of the mechanism and functions of "Ranhou", stimulate their interest in studying DMs and make some contributions to the future studies in this field.The innovative aspect of the present research lies in the large quantity of linguistic materials selected from one of the representative Chinese interview programs ——"Yang Lan One on One".42 episodes of the program lasting 1200 minutes are selected and transcribed by the author into written materials. In the discourse organizing model of "Ranhou", the functions of topic replacing and combination of time and turn-taking are firstly put forward. Besides, the author makes an elaborate calculation of the frequencies of these functions and uses a table to display these frequencies clearly. At last, the author presents the distribution of "Ranhou" in different genders (male and female), age groups (post-50s, post-60s, post-70s, and post-80s), and geographical locations (mainland, HongKong and TaiWan) with a diagram so as to explore the relations between the frequency of "Ranhou" and the above factors.Through the analysis of "Ranhou" surrounding the two core questions, some tentative conclusions and findings are drawn upon as follows:firstly, a discourse organizing model of "Ranhou" is established based on the position of "Ranhou" in discourse. The model contains turn initiating function, turn continuing function which consists of establishing a topic, continuing a topic, converting a topic, returning to the original topic and topic replacing, turn holding function and combination of turn-taking and time. Among these discourse functions, the functions of topic replacing and combination of turn-taking and time are newly put forward. Secondly, the factors of age, gender and geographic location will have some influence on the frequency of using "Ranhou". The women, the younger people and residents in mainland are more likely to use "Ranhou" than men, the elder and people outside mainland.Obviously, only 42 episodes selected from one program are far from enough to testify the model and answer the two questions. That is to say, the frequent use of "Ranhou" may just reflect the individual speech style rather than the general phenomenon. As to the limitations and potential problems, the author will continue to make further and deeper exploration and analysis.