초록 열기/닫기 버튼
The purpose of this study is to investigate which analysis better explains the use of English discourse markers between Schiffrin’s coherence-based analysis and Blakemore’s relevance-based analysis. In this paper, It is argued that the latter proposal is more comprehensive than the former for several reasons. First, there is an example which can be explained not by coherent but by incoherent interpretation only. This incoherent explanation is acceptable because it is optimally relevant. Second, if a discourse marker links units of discourse, it cannot be used discourse initially. However, utterance-initial ‘so’, ‘after all’ can connect an utterance and a context. Lastly, in a relevance-theoretic approach, a discourse marker ‘now’ encodes a procedural constraint on context selection rather than serving functions related to local discourse coherence according to Schourup. In conclusion, with relevance-based approach, the use of English discourse markers can be explained in a more unified way than coherence-based approach.
