Pragmatic Markers in Trump’s Speeches Based on the Relevance-Adaptation Theory

Abstract

Pragmatic marker is a kind of marker on the level of discourse, and it plays a role of pauses, transitions, and delays in discourse, making the discourse more coherent, more organized, and serving as a guide to indicate and prompt. 

This thesis analyzes the discourse markers in the speeches of President Trump of the United States in the framework of Verschueren's adaptation theory and Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory. This thesis is divided into four parts. The first part briefly defines the pragmatic marker and introduces its characteristics. The second part is the theoretical framework. This part focuses on Verschueren’s adaptation theory and the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson. In part three, twenty papers are selected from the speeches of President Trump of the United States to create a small corpus. The main classifications of pragmatic markers in Trump’s speeches have been analyzed in this part. The fourth part interprets the functions of pragmatic markers in Trump’s speeches based on the relevance-adaptation theory.

Finally, the author concludes that the pragmatic markers in Trump speech are mainly divided into four categories: discourse connectives, response markers, information and participation markers, and markers of information management. There are six functions of pragmatic markers, namely, meta-pragmatic awareness, coherence, hesitation and consideration, reinforcement and emphasis, contrastive, and comments. The author hopes this thesis will reveal the speaker's meta-pragmatic awareness and pragmatic strategies and provide some references for the understanding and use of pragmatic markers.

Key words: pragmatic markers; relevance theory; adaptation theory