A Relevance-theoretical Study On Gender Differences Of DM You Know

Discourse markers are an important part in our daily conversation and they play an indispensable role in making successful communication.They are not used as syntactic elements but can be seen everywhere in our daily life communication.Early in the 1970s,this kind of small items has already attracted the attention of many scholars.For the past thirty years,with the rise and development of pragmatics,discourse markers have gained wide attention of scholars from home and abroad.Up to now,there are mainly three approaches to studying discourse markers:the syntactic-pragmatics approach,the semantic-pragmatics and the cognitive-pragmatics approach.This study is to focus on the gender differences of discourse marker you know under the framework of relevance theory proposed by Sperber&Wilson,which provides a new perspective for the study of discourse markers.Besides,gender factor is added to this study.This thesis aims to discuss the following two questions:1.Are there any significant gender differences in the use of DM you know in the sitcom Friends?2.What kinds of pragmatic functions does DM you know used by males and females play?Are there any gender differences?The first question can be further divided into two small questions.1)Are there any differences in the total frequency of DM you know by males and females?2)Are there any gender differences in the turn position of DM you know?The research method of this thesis is to build two small corpora,which are based on the first season of the American sitcom Friends,in which the talks of the six main characters are kept and the talks of others are deleted and then the talks of the six main characters are divided into male talk and female talk,thus two small self-built corpora are finished.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this thesis.The results show that females have a tendency to use more DM you know than males in their daily communication.Both males and females are more likely to put DM you know in the turn-medial positions.They seldom put the DM you know in the turn-final positions.There are mainly ten pragmatic functions of the DM you know.i.e.,you know as a reminding marker,as a repairing marker,as a stalling marker,as an introducing-new information marker,as a waiting-response marker,as a turn-shifting marker,as a further elaborating marker,as an emotion marker,as an advising marker and as a supposing marker.Both men and women are more likely to use DM you know for the purposes of stalling,new information introduction,waiting-response and turn-shifting than the other six functions.Of the four most commonly used functions,men are more likely to use you know as a waiting-response marker than women;as for the other three pragmatic functions,women are more likely to use them than men.This thesis focuses on the gender differences of discourse marker you know from the perspective of relevance theory,which can provide a new research angle for the study of discourse markers,make audience understand the discourse markers used by males and females better in American sitcoms and help Chinese learners better understand and use discourse marker you know.It should also be pointed out that the thesis has its own limitations.First,though language in sitcoms especially language in Friends is believed to be really close to actual language practices,they do have differences.Second,this thesis only bases on the first season of sitcom Friends,the other nine seasons are not involved,so the results have to be further studied.Thirdly,the author's subjectivity and ability may influence the recognizing and analyzing of the functions of you know as a discourse marker in the first season of sitcom Friends.Besides,though this thesis tries to find the gender differences of DM you know,the causes for the differences are not studied.Lastly,the real protagonists in sitcom Friends are girls instead of boys which to a certain extent affects the credibility of the results.