A Study Of Discourse Markers In 2016 American Presidential Debates From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Discourse markers are frequently used in oral language,which do not have any influence on the true value of sentences,but they play an important role in the generation and interpretation of utterances.Discourse markers have attracted much attention from scholars since 1970 s.They make research on discourse markers mainly from the three angles of discourse coherence,semantic-pragmatic and relevance theory.The adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren,provides a general pragmatic angle for explaining the language use,which offers a new perspective for research into the use of discourse markers.However,there is scant research on discourse markers occurring in American presidential debates under the theoretical framework of adaptation theory.The paper tries to delve into why different discourse markers are utilized by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in American presidential debates and analyze the metapragmatic awareness reflected by these discourse markers from the angle of adaptation theory.When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton present their opinions,attack their opponents or defend their own proposals in 2016 American presidential debates,they have utilized many discourse markers,which is the research key point of the paper.The paper first makes classification of the discourse markers employed by Trump and Clinton in the debates,and adopts the qualitative method to explore that they choose different discourse markers as adaptation to communicative contexts and linguistic contexts in order to fulfill their own communicative aims,and the communicative contexts are composed of mental world of audiences,social world and the physical world where people are situated.And the paper finds that during the process of debates,as the contexts are changing constantly,debaters choose suitable discourse markers to adapt to the constantly changing contexts so that they can satisfy a successful communication,which shows the dynamics of adaptability in the debates.And these discourse markers chosen by candidates play important roles in the debates,for example,starting a new topic,expressing attitudes and indicating illustration as well as supplementary instruction,which reflect their differentkinds of metapragmatic awareness.The paper analyzes the dynamic adaptation of discourse markers employed by debaters to communicative contexts and linguistic contexts,which are dominated under different kinds of metapragmatic awareness.Through the study of discourse markers in American presidential debates from the perspective of adaptation theory,it hopes to provide people with some suggestions on how to use them in debates or other situations and help people have a better understanding of adaptation theory.