A Study On Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Marker Well In Friends Under The Perspective Of Adaptation-Relevance Theory

The concept of discourse marker was firstly proposed by Schiffrin in 1987. She defined discourse marker as "sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk". It is one of the linguistic means which is conducive to the discourse organization. As one of the most frequently used discourse markers, well has been studied by more and more linguists and scholars. Different researchers have analyzed the discourse marker well from different perspectives, including the relevance theory, the adaptation theory, coherence theory, and few from the perspective of relevance-adaptation theory. In recent years, the adaptation-relevance theory is more and more used in the linguistic researches. And it has been proved to be powerful and persuasive when analyzing discourse marker. Therefore, this thesis attempts to make a systematic analysis on the functions of the discourse marker well from the perspective of adaptation-relevance theory. The examples used in the thesis are all taken from the corpus of Friends (season one), which is a very popular situation comedy in both China and western countries.In the corpus, "Well" appears 351 times in the corpus, among which 13 times are exerting the functions of notional word, and 338 times acting as a discourse marker. The functions of the discourse marker well can be described from three major aspects: the function of discourse organization, the function of contextual adaptation, and the function of interpersonal interaction. In different contextual situations, the functions of well exist subtle differences. Therefore, the author subdivides the three major functions into several detailed functions in subcategories. As for the function of discourse organization, well can be used as discourse-initiating marker, discourse-ending marker, turn-taking marker, turn-continuation marker, turn-holding marker, and topic-shifting marker. From the aspect of context adaptation, the discourse marker well can be used to adapt to linguistic context, adapt to situation context and adapt to background context. And on the aspect of interpersonal interaction, discourse marker well performs the function of emotional marker, informative marker, and face-threatening mitigator.