A Research On Discourse Markers In TED Educational Speeches

Discourse markers(abbreviated as DMs)are words or structures with procedural meaning in discourse.They are widely used in communication and do not affect the propositional meaning.The proper use of DMs in discourse communication can enhance the coherence of discourse,help the speaker to construct the context of communication,and better express the communicative purpose.DMs often appear in our daily conversations,such as well,you know,I mean,and,and actually.In recent years,with the development of pragmatics,the study of DMs have been a topic of concern home and abroad.Looking back at the research in this field,it can be found that the current research on DMs mainly focuses on the written language and spoken language.It is also involved in the field of speech,but it is less involved in the field of TED educational speech.Based on the Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson,by adopting Wang Lifei and Zhu Weihua's classification of DMs,60 native English speeches from TED educational speeches in 2009-2018 are selected as research materials,and self-built corpus are adopted to analyze the characteristics and pragmatic functions of DMs.The main research questions are as follows:(1)What are the characteristics of the frequency distribution of DMs in TED educational speeches?(2)What are the similarities and differences of DMs used in humanistic and scientific educational speeches?(3)What pragmatic functions do DMs have in TED educational speeches?The study finds that(1)DMs are widely used in TED educational speeches.The use of DMs has been stable in the past ten years,both in humanities and in science education speeches.In educational speeches with two kinds of topics,on average,each utterance contains more than one discourse marker.(2)Both in humanistic and scientific educational speeches,additional DMs are most frequently used in 15 types of DMs in two kinds of educational speeches,accounting for nearly forty percent.Causal DMs have the second frequency in the TED educational speeches.Emphatic DMs ranked third.However,Additional DMs,Temporal DMs,Meaning filters,Concessive DMs,Repetitive DMs,Optional DMs are used more in the humanities than in the science speeches.Emphatic DMs,Causal DMs,Comparative DMs,Qualificatory DMs,Equivalent DMs,Sequential DMs,Meaningless filters,Exemplifying DMs and Summative DMs are used more in science educational speeches than in humanistic educational speeches.Three DMs appear in almost every speech,and they are and,so(Causal DMs)and but,and the frequency of each are all above 300.For the fourth-ranked high-frequency discourse marker,the humanities and sciences are different.In 30 pieces of humanities speeches,Temporal DMs when was the most used,followed by the Qualificatory DMs if,Emphatic DMs very was used in the third place,and Equivalent DMs or was used fourthly.While among 30 pieces of scientific speeches,Qualificatory DMs if was used most frequently,followed by Temporal DMs now,Equivalent DMs or and Temporary DMs when.(3)Through the analysis of specific examples,eight pragmatic functions of DMs in TED educational speeches are put forward,including textual cohesion function,discourse construction function,information function,attitude and emotion function,existing proposition strengthening function,logical transition function,filler or delay function,and context constructing function.Among various DMs,the functions of Additional DMs and Filters are more flexible than other categories.This study supplements the study of DMs and lays a foundation for successful English speeches in the future.Moreover,some new suggestions for English teaching are also put forward.Teachers can add a module of DMs in the class to help students to build a successful communication context and achieve effective communication.At the same time,the analysis of this kind of speech can also help the majority of TED speech enthusiasts to better appreciate,understand and learn the TED speech,thus improve students' awareness of the use of DMs,and lay a foundation for a successful English speech.