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Chapter One Introduction

This chapter can be organized into four sections. The first section introduces theobjectives of the present study. It is followed by presenting the reasons andsignificance of accomplishing the study. The last section illustrates the structure of thethesis.

1.1 Research Objectives
The study of discourse markers has always been an important research content ofpragmatics, syntactic, and grammaticalization (e.g. Schiffrin, 1987; Blackmore, 1996;Fraser, 1999; Ran, 2003; Zheng, 2014; Li, Xiang & Yang, 2015).At abroad, Schiffrin (1987:31) defines discourse markers as “sequentiallydependent elements which bracket units of talk”. Blackmore (2002:9) points out thatdiscourse markers play important roles in the process of pragmatic inference. Bystudying the uses of discourse markers, the hearers can better understand the speakers’intended meaning. Both the speakers and the hearers can benefit from theachievements which have been made by those excellent researchers. Fraser (1999)defines discourse markers as “a pragmatic class, lexical expressions drawn from thesyntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbials, and prepositional phrases”.At home, Ran (2000) holds that the functions of discourse markers mainlybelong to the category of pragmatics, not to syntactics or semantics. Zhou and Wang(2012) examine the process that how discourse markers achieve semantic bleachingby means of metaphors and inferences and point out that discourse sense is formed bythe words’original meaning and specific context. The discourse sense is formed in theprocess of grammaticalization. Zheng (2014) reviews the sociopragmatic studies ondiscourse markers. She emphasizes “not only the grammaticalization process andpragmatic-cognitive functions of the discourse markers, but also their social andcommunicative implications in real life”.
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1.2 Reasons for the Present Study
As Shin and Nation (2008) show in their study, discourse marker you know isone of the most frequently used discourse markers by native speakers. In recent years,many studies have been conducted to deal with discourse marker you know fromdifferent perspectives both at home and abroad (e.g. Holmes, 1986; Blackmore, 2002;Tree, 2002; Macaulay, 2002; Ran, 2002; Xu, 2009; Zheng, 2014). Their discussionscover you know in such fields as daily conversation, English language teaching, andcourtroom. However, researchers have paid little attention on discourse marker youknow in academic spoken discourse, which still leaves some space for further study.Although previous studies have achieved a lot in the exploration of discoursemarker you know, some questions still remain unanswered. For example, is thefrequency and distribution of you know in academic spoken discourse different fromthat in the daily conversation? What are the pragmatic functions of you know in academic spoken discourse? How does discourse marker you know produce defaultmeaning? Therefore, this study attempts to address these questions based on the datacollected from MICASE.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

This chapter can be organized into three sections. The first section makesreviews about the study on you know from the approach of pragmatics, sciolinguisticsand SLA. It is followed by reviewing the study of the Default Semantics. The lastsection illustrates the summary of this chapter.

2.1 Studies