A Pragmatic And Cognitive Analysis Of Discourse Markers And The Application In Writing

An extensive body of pragmatic and linguistic research deals with a functionally related class of expressions most often referred to as discourse markers (henceforth DMs) mainly drawn from the syntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. While these researches have investigated discourse markers from different perspectives, which has caused unavoidable disagreements regarding such fundamental issues as their definition, classification, meaning and functions, it is generally accepted that such expressions do not contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance but play facilitating and constraining roles in utterance interpretation. They encode procedural meaning rather than conceptual.This paper first reviews the principal issues in this research area with special reference to two prominent frameworks in which discourse markers are studied. Within a coherence-based framework, discourse markers are argued to link the utterance they introduce with previous discourse units as cohesive devices and so contribute to discourse coherence. Within a relevance-theoretical approach, discourse markers link the utterance with a context as constraints on the interpretation process to guide the interpretation process by specifying certain properties of context and contextual effects.The paper then makes an investigation into the use of discourse markers in Chinese college students'writing. In order to examine and analyze the number and typology of discourse markers used, the author borrows the tripartite classification of discourse markers in terms of constraints on relevance in utterance interpretation, which is suggested by Blakemore(1987) and illustrated by Chen Xinren (2002), collects the data from the subjects'compositions and compares the use of discourse markers in those compositions written by three remarkably different groups of college students by using SPSS in order to determine the relationship between different language proficiency levels and the use of DMs in writing and to investigate college students'pragmatic and cognitive awareness of encoding procedural meaning in writing. The results show that the learners of all the three groups use DMs in their writing more or less, which indicates that all of them have the pragmatic and cognitive awareness of expressing procedural meaning in their writing. Besides, the results show that language proficiency level and the use of DMs are to some extent related. However, the three groups of subjects demonstrate great differences in the application of DMs in writing. Researches of the use of DMs are illustrated to show that DMs are important in improving students'writing and improving their pragmatic and cognitive awareness of expressing procedural meaning. This study, which has some pedagogical implications, also raises issues for future studies.This thesis is presented in six chapters. Chapter one introduces the fundamental issues concerning terminology, definitions and characteristics of discourse markers and we come to a revised and working definition of discourse markers. Chapter two investigates DMs within the coherence-based framework to explore how they contribute to discourse coherence and focuses on four research efforts started in the mid-1980s. Chapter three examines DMs within the relevance-based framework from...