LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 15:2 February 2015
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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A Study of Discourse Marker in Prem Chand’s “Kafan”

Nazia Saleem Ansari

Premchand's Kafan

Abstract

In this paper, I try to interpret Premchandra's short story "Kafan" from a pragmatic point of view, specifically by applying the notion of "Implicature". The objective of my study is to show that, the chosen approach will be helpful to untangle the complex density of any literary text. The important feature of my paper is that I will not take any help from literary criticism. This paper also deals with the importance of discourse markers, that how they amplify and intensify the given content. I wish this paper will give us a new approach to explore any literary text. It is argued that the ‘fresh’ reader, who has no previous knowledge of the characteristics either of the text or of the author, can perfectly achieve a good understanding of the literary discourse through this kind of pragmatic approach.

Key words: Prem Chand, Kafan short story, discourse markers

Approaches to the Study of Discourse Markers

During the last two decades, analyses of discourse markers have occupied a larger space in the literature on pragmatics. Discourse markers have been considered from a variety of perspectives and approaches, example as signalling “a sequential relationship” between utterance (Fraser 1990; Fraser 1999) as marking discourse coherence (Schiffrin1987; Lenk 1998), and from a relevance-theoretic point of view (Andersen 2001; Blakemore 2002; Blass 1990; Jucker 1993), they have been analysed with regard to gender (Erman 1992; Holmes 1986) and age (Kyratzis and Ervin-Tripp 1999; Andersen 2001; Erman 2001) and in bilingual contexts (Goss and Salmons 2000; Maschler 2000; Matras 2000); they have been analysed as a group and have been treated individually. There is general agreements that discourse marker contribute to the pragmatic meaning of utterances and thus play an important role in the pragmatic competence of the speaker. Or, as Crystal comments in more everyday language, “I tend to think of [pragmatic expression such as you know] as the oil which helps us perform the complex task of spontaneous speech production and interaction smoothly and efficiently” (Crystal 1988:48)

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Nazia Saleem Ansari, Ph.D. Scholar
Department of Linguistics
A.M.U. Aligarh
Uttar Pradesh
India
nightangle.naaz@gmail.com

Address: Nazia Saleem Ansari
D/o Mohd Saleem Ansari
Kashana-e-Kausar
Jamia Urdu Road
Civil Lines
Aligarh 202002
Uttar Pradesh
India
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