Discourse marker as a means toexpress the coherence relationships oflanguage is often usedby thespeakers to connect the follow-up unit ofutterance or text with the current state ofutterance. Since the seventiesof the twentieth century, discourse markers have become thefocus of domestic and foreign studies, and especially in the past decade, with the developmentof pragmatics, the study of this field has developed rapidly. Although so far there isno unifieddefinition for discourse marker, in recent years scholars have tended to treat it as a kind oflanguage phenomenon seen in the conversation with a pragmatic function. Because the previous studies on discourse marker are based on different foundations,scholars provide different classifications that will induce the result that there is still no uniformcriteriafor domestic or foreign classification. Up to now, although many scholarshave employed three theories, coherence, syntax/semantic-pragmatics and relevance, in thestudy ofdiscourse markers, fewcan provide the reasonable interpretation of the phenomenon whydiscourse markers perform different functions under different contexts, and how to minimizeits ambiguity still leavessome vacancy in the present studies. This paper attempts to apply Halliday's socio~semiotics theory to explain the pragmaticfunctions of discourse marker well, and it combines some concepts like context to explore itsconstraint onwell and otherfunction words, which is one the creative points in this paper. Thenbased on Svartvik's and Jucker's achievement, it tries to explore a new classification ofpragmatic well combinedwith Brown and Levinson's facetheory to further analyze itspoliteness function. This study takes well in Season l from American soap opera Gossip Girl as the researchsubject, and tries to define its pragmatic functions in a new classification. In the extracted 521well there include 41 non-discourse marker uses, wlule theother 480 well all belongto thediscourse markers, whichfunctions represent in two aspects: textual function and interpersonalfunctions. In the textual aspect, its function is mainly performed inthe introduction of newtopics and guidance of tums, ancl the interpersonal function is mainly concentrated on thepoliteness of well, which can reduce and avoid the disagreements of opinions or rejects of therequest for the listener, whose behavior maythreaten face. Because the useof well ownsdifferences according to the change of the context, these two main categories can further berefined into a number of sub-categories that representcareful analysis ofthestudy. Another creative point liesin the combinationof the politeness function of well with facetheory, from two aspects, positive politeness and negativepoliteness to explore the detailed andthorough classification of well. Finally, based onthree nonlinguistic factors ofinterculturalcommunications-the speaker's gender, age, and relation, itcarries on a lot of systematic dataanalyses, summarizes their influence on well'sinten?ersonal function, and mixes with data toquest for its effect and influence on actualoral communication to draw theuniversal rules with the aim to guarantee the successful verbal communication. That is alsoa bold attempt of thepaper. In summary, this article isbased on the previous theoretical results, and under theframeworks of context to quest thenew firamework of well for itspragmatic functions, and itpays more attention to the politeness in the role of interpersonal communications andconnections. 展开▼
