A Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of The Discourse Marker "I Mean" In Modern Family From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Discourse markers are widely used in daily communication,which do not affect the truth condition of sentences,but play a vital role in the generation and interpretation of utterance and even in maintaining interpersonal relationship.At present,discourse markers research has become a hot topic for linguists.Fruitful achievements have been made by them.However,the research perspectives on discourse markers are mainly from coherence and relevance perspective,rarely from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.Based on Adaptation Theory,this thesis studies the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker “I mean” in American sitcom Modern Family.Combining with the scripts,this paper analyzes the pragmatic functions of “I mean” from adaptation to communicative context and linguistic context,including the adaptation to mental world,social world,physical world,discourse coherence,intertextuality and linear sequencing.Through analysis,the paper summarizes seven pragmatic functions of “I mean”,which are explaining and supplementing,reminding and emphasizing,information repairing,topic management,face-threat mitigating,certain emotion and attitude expressing,discourse organization and blanks-filling.In addition,the paper analyzes the possible reasons of different occurrence of “I mean” in different contexts,in order to enlighten language users to use discourse markers to achieve successful communication.