关联理论角度下的高中课堂教师话语标记语的语用功能研究.docVIP

Introduction 1 Introduction As a common linguistic phenomenon, discourse markers greatly contribute to constraining the meaning of utterances and facilitating the understanding of utterances. The study of discourse markers is very important and necessary. In the chapter, the author will introduce the background of research, the significance of research and the layout of the thesis. Background of Research Discourse markers (henceforth DMs for short) are used frequently in peoples‘ communication. As a common linguistic phenomenon, they arouse many linguists‘ interests. A number of scholars have done some researches and have made great achievements on DMs according to their different study objectives and perspectives. Amongst the existing studies, grammatical-pragmatic, the semantic-pragmatic and the cognitive-pragmatic approaches are representative. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many well-known scholars, such as Schiffrin (1987), Fraser (1989,1990), Blakemore (1987,1992), Hansen (1998), and Jucker (1998) have conducted to research on discourse markers deeply and comprehensively so that research on DMs expanded swiftly. In addition, the research on DMs developed fast in many fields, DMs ―figure prominently not only in pragmatic and discourse analytic research but also in studies of language acquisition and language pedagogy, as well as in research on sociolinguistic topics ranging from gender variation to code-switching” (Schourup, 1999，p.228). Among the three approaches, Diane Blakemore‘s (1987,1992) cognitive-pragmatic vision, which bases on Sperber Wilson‘s relevance theory, is most influential and processing for studying DMs. According to relevance theory, human communication is a process of cognition. There is a general target in this process, which is spending the least processing effort to achieve the maximum cognitive effects. In order to achieve this target, the speaker should provide utterances that have adequate relevance to attract the hearer‘s attentio