A Pragmatic Analysis of Discourse Markers in TED Talks开题报告

 2022-08-13 14:31:39

1. 研究目的与意义

Discourse markers can be seen everywhere in life, playing the functions of pause, transition and correlation. As a means of language, discourse markers do not participate in the expression of propositions, but help to organize the discourse, express the speaker''''s mood, attitude and emotion, affect the listener''''s understanding of the discourse. Similarly, discourse markers have important pragmatic functions in lecture. From this point of view, I want to take the Ted talks as an example.

As the media of some new thoughts or values, Ted talks cover many fields such as science and technology, education and design. The feature of Ted talks is that there is no complicated and lengthy professional lecture, the views are enlightening, straight to the point, there are many kinds of views, and the views are novel. From the beginning, Ted insisted on inviting people from all walks of life from all over the world. Their speeches are either the transmission of truth and true feelings, or the speeches of the most cutting-edge areasprofessional field. They have a certain influence on the audience''''s way of thinking and behavior by expressing their thoughts and creativity.

Since the establishment of Ted website in 2002, a lot of high-definition speech videos have been released for people to spread freely. In China, Ted has attracted more and more attention from English learners, English educators and researchers. It provides a good learning platform for Chinese English learners. Therefore, this paper studies the pragmatic functions of discourse markers in Ted talks. The reason why this paper chooses Ted talks is that many discourse markers are widely used in this kind of speech to connect discourse information and achieve its pragmatic purpose. Ted talks are full of vitality. Speakers often emphasize some speech markers to better convey information and interact with people to deepen the audience''''s understanding of the speech and arouse their attention to important information.

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2. 研究内容和预期目标

Ted talks is a suitable material for the study of discourse markers. This paper selects ten most notable speeches in 2019, which were chosen by TED Curator Chris Anderson from the TED website, to study the functions of discourse markers.

This paper focuses on the discourse markers in this ten speeches to analyze the pragmatic function. The thesis includes the following five parts. The chapter one mainly introduces research background and the organization of this paper. Chapter two is mainly about the literature review and current studies of discourse markers. Chapter three is research tool and methodology. Chapter four is about the main findings and discussion of the result of this research. Chapter five summarizes the conclusions and shortcomings of the research and the enlightenment of the study.

This paper puts forward the following research questions: What is the distribution and frequency of discourse markers in this ten speeches? How are the pragmatic functions ofdiscourse markers in TED talks realized?

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3. 国内外研究现状

Different scholars hold different views on the definition of discourse markers. Levinson (1983) believes that discourse markers are a subject worthy of study, emphasizing the pragmatic functions of discourse markers. In his book Pragmatics, he does not have a precise definition of discourse markers, but describes such expressions: “There are many words and phrases in English, no doubt, most languages have these words and phrases, which show the relationship between discourse and previous discourse. Examples art utterance-initial usages of but, therefore, in conclusion, besides, actually, after all, and so on.” (1983:87-88) Schiffin (1987) pointed out that there is a class of words (for example, therefore, I mean) that can not promote dialogue in other ways, which are called discourse markers. She believes that discourse markers, as a sequence related component, can make discourse more coherent. In addition, she points out that discourse markers promote discourse coherence by establishing the coherence between discourse units. He Ziran[何自然] and Mo Aiping[莫爱平] (2002) hold that discourse markers are discourses that restrict the construction and understanding of discourse. Discourse markers can express meaning and emotion without affecting the real state of proposition in discourse. In addition, discourse markers play an important role in identifying the coherence between two discourse components. Discourse markers do not express structural meaning or conceptual meaning, but only point out a certain direction for people to understand discourse and limit people''''s understanding of conversation. Chen Jiajun[陈家隽] (2018) believes that discourse markers essentially reflect the efforts of human beings to guide the communicative object to understand the meaning of discourse in the process of discourse communication. Discourse markers can not only accurately convey the content of the discourse, but also guide the listener to correctly understand the discourse, so as to effectively realize the speaker''''s communicative intention.

Based on the viewpoints of discourse markers by many scholars at home and abroad, this paper proposes the definition of discourse markers in this study. Discourse markers refer to how the relevance of a discourse segment depends on the previous segment or context, which narrows the scope of contextual hypothesis and leads the listener to obtain the expected meaning. They are syntactically optional and do not constitute or affect the content of discourse or proposition.

Different scholars tend to study discourse markers from different perspectives, resulting in different classifications. Lenk (1998) divides discourse markers into two categories according to mark relations:(1) retrospective discourse markers, such as, as I said before, anyway, clear, still, etc., indicating a relationship between current discourse and previous context; (2) prospective discourse markers, for example, what else, by the way, furthermore and so on, showing follow-up relationships. Fraser (1996) believes that discourse markers can be divided into four categories at the most general level: topic switching markers (such as incidentally, by the way, that reminds me, etc.) , contrastive markers (such as however, but, on the other hand, whereas, in comparison, rather), elaborative markers (such as furthermore, moreover, in addition, etc.) and inferential markers (such as so, therefore, on that condition, accordingly, it can be concluded that, etc.). According to Philip (1995), discourse markers can be divided into additive markers (also, furthermore), listing markers (for example, such as), contrastive markers (but, on the contrary), causal markers (because, since, so) and sequential markers (firstly, then, next), etc. Wang Lifei[王立非] and Zhu Weihua[祝卫华] (2005) absorbed the reasonable parts of other classifications and divided discourse markers into two categories based on Philip''''s classification. The first category is called logical connectives, which includes 13 subcategories (additive, exemplifying, contrastive, repetitive, causal, sequential, summative, concessive, temporal, emphatic, qualificatory, equivalent, selective). The second category is called pause filler, which has no semantic meaning but only communicative meaning. This category includes two subcategories: fillers without definite meaning and fillers with meaning. In order to conduct the research appropriately, in conclusion, this study adopts the classification of Fraser.

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4. 计划与进度安排

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5. 参考文献

Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. New York: Cambridge University Press,

Schiffrin, D. (1994). Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.

何自然amp;莫爱屏. (2002).话语标记语与语用照应. 广东外语外贸大学学报. (01). 1-6.

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