| Discourse markers are important carriers of language that convey many functions.The existence of discourse markers is the common character of all verbal communication. They are almost all function words, and do not have many semantic contents themselves.TED is a private non-profit organization in the United States. The organization has developed from a club about 1000 people into a community that has more than100000 visitors every day. TED convenes many prominent figures in science, design,literature, music and other fields to share their thinking and exploration about technology, society and mankind.The thesis makes qualitative and quantitative research and analyzes the pragmatic functions of discourse markers according to their distributions and accents.The thesis aims to find out the occurrence frequencies and accent distributions of different kinds of discourse markers in different types of TED public speeches and pragmatic functions of discourse markers in selected corpus. The thesis also tries to find out whether the accent phenomenon of discourse markers has prominent role on speaker’s discourse intention and whether there are positive correlations between accent rates of discourse markers and the subjectivity of speech discourse.The research results show:(1)The occurrence frequencies and accent rates of different kinds of discourse markers have differences and similarities in TED speeches.(2)Emphatic markers have strengthening proposition function; filling markers mainly have subjective function, interactive function, and filling discourse blank function; causal markers mainly have discourse deduction and continuity function; additive markers have information supplement function; contrastive markers have information correction, information supplement and information contrast function; temporal markers have discourse framework function.(3)Accent phenomenon of discourse markers has prominent role in speaker’s discourse intention and there are positive correlations between accent rates of discourse markers and the subjectivity of speech contents.In the specific analysis of the function of discourse markers, the thesis selects discourse markers that are used more flexibly and more frequently in all kinds of discourse markers coming from corpus for detailed analysis. We hope that the study can provide reference for Chinese college students’ acquisition of discourse markers and English speeches and the teaching of discourse markers, and make them realizethe important role that the correct usage of discourse markers’ prosodic features play in conveying information to audience and interacting with them in public speeches. |
PDF Full Text Request