A Study On The Discourse Markers In The Program Dialogue

Discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are linguistic elements that signal relations between units of talk, relation at the exchange, action, ideational, and participation framework level of the oral discourse, such as, oh, now, and, well, but, or, so, because, you know, I mean, etc. From the grammar perspective, DMs do not own much semantic, however, they do arouse the listeners'attention, develop the turn, maintain the turn, and etc.From the end of 1960s to the beginning of 1970s, Zellig Harris, Halliday, Hymes and other researchers started their research on this field.Since the 1970s, interest in DMs has increased commensurately with growing interest in the production and comprehension of extended discourse and, more generally, in pragmatic and contextual aspects of utterance interpretation. This broadening of interest has drawn increased attention to those elements of linguistic structure.This research examines the using statement of DMs, in the program Dialogue by comparison and contrast between two groups of people----the native group and the Chinese group, so as to observe the using statement of DMs among different people. In addition, the data is also compared with other corpus in small scale. The result shows that for Group 1-----the Chinese group----- the favorite 5 DMs are I think, you know, I mean, well, and so; while the Group 2-----Native group----are you know, well, I mean, I think , and you see.And finally the research discusses some certain DMs such as I think, you know, well, oh, I mean, okay, yeah in detail. The result also shows that specific DM differs from each other.However, this study is far from satisfactory due to some practical limitations, since all the data collected were categorized and analyzed artificially and by no means of using computer or other automatic method. As a result, errors are inevitable and the preciseness of the findings could not be reached exactly. The materials including 48 dialogue segments, is relatively insufficient though. Therefore, some specific DMs could not be obviously seen from the results.Meanwhile as the research design shows that the comparison are made possible by controlling other variables, such as, age, gender, and social background. And, of course, such factors indeed influence the usage of DMs. More generally, we have seen that DMs can have specialized functions in one particular type of discourse. Since the question-answer sequence differs from that of greetings, storytelling, arguments and other genres of talk, certainly the functions of DMs should differ accordingly, which needs to be extended more in the future.