1.3 Organization of the Study 源]自=优尔-^论-文"网·www.youerw.com/

   The study consists of five parts. Part 1 gives a general introduction to the background, objectives and structure of the study. Part 2 reviews the study of discourse markers, relevance theory, pragmatic functions of Well along as the corpus Modern Family. Part 3 depicts the method of calculating and analyzing the pragmatic functions of Well. Part 4 analyzes and exemplifies six pragmatic functions of Well and its application in four typical contexts. Part 5 concludes on the major findings and implications of the study together with limitation of the study and further suggestions.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Definition of Discourse Markers

Since 1970s, with the growing tendency of the study in Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, discourse markers as one of the linguistic phenomena have also aroused many scholars’ attention all around the world. Different scholars hold various views about the definition of discourse markers. Here are some representative definitions of Discourse Makers.文献综述

In his book Pragmatics, Levinson discovers the characteristics of Discourse Makers and suggests that “there are many words and phrases in English …what they seem to do is indicate, often in very complex ways, just how the utterance that contains them is a response to, or a continuation of, some portion of the prior discourse”(Levinson, 1983:87-88). He didn’t give a specific term, but he mentioned Discourse Makers’ functions and this has also attracted more scholars to identify it.

Schiffrin defines Discourse Makers as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” in her book Discourse Markers (Schiffrin, 1987:37), the publication of which attracted the public attention to discourse makers. She points out that Discourse Makers can work at different levels of discourse to connect utterances on either a single plane or across different planes.

Redeker considers Discourse Makers as discourse operators; she suggests that a discourse marker is “a word or phrase…that is uttered with the primary function by bringing the listener’s attention to a particular kind of linkage of the upcoming utterance with the immediate discourse context” (Redeker, 1991:1168).

And from the perspective of grammatical pragmatics, Fraser focuses on the grammatical status of discourse makers. He considers them as “a class of lexical expressions drawn primarily from the syntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbs and prepositional phrases” (Fraser,1999: 946). He suggests that discourse marker signals the relationship between the utterance that they introduce and the preceding utterance.

Based on the relevance theory framework, Blakemore (1987) argues that discourse marker refers to a syntactically heterogeneous class of expressions which are distinguished by their function in discourse and the kind of meaning they encode. In her view, “discourse connectives” impose constraints on relevance by virtue of the inferential connections they express. 

With the popularity of Discourse Makers, scholars comprehend them from different perspectives. The semantic-pragmatic and the syntactic-pragmatic theory together with the cognitive-pragmatic are three main aspects in the study of Discourse Makers.

From the perspective of semantic pragmatics, Östman (1981) is one of the earliest scholars to study discourse marker, who regards it as “pragmatic particles” which can convey the speaker’s attitude and emotion and has three major functions: a) discourse marking and organizing; b) interaction signaling; 3) attitude marking.