Study Of Co-ordinating Conjunctions In The Aspect Of Discourse Markers

Speech communication is for communicating with each other. In order to communicate successfully and clearly, all kinds of means are applied to transfer information to listeners, including words and phrases which don't form the semantic meaning of context. The expressions neither change truth-value of semantics nor transfer proposition meanings; they only apply information markers to help understand speech, which are called"Discourse Markers"., which are necessary in speech, to help speakers and listeners understand and react, to connect speech and context.In modern Chinese, conjunctions is a limited word family. Before, most of the studies were about the category, division and usage of conjunctions from traditional aspect but few of them were from pragmatic and cognitive aspect, let alone co-ordinating conjunctions. In fact, in oral and written Chinese, the grammatical functions of co-ordinating conjunctions are weakened from joining units to premedical functions.Relevance theory by Sperber and Willson are used as the theoretical basic of the paper to study co-ordinating conjunctions in the aspect of discourse markers. Firstly we introduce properties, characteristics and functions of discourse markers and co-ordinating conjunctions, and to point out the co-ordinating conjunctions share discourse maker-functions. Secondly we divide all the six co-ordinating conjunctions to three group according to appearance frenquencies in different context style, followed each co-ordinating conjunction is studied carefully and come out the discourse marker function one by one. Finally conclusion is about the same and different position and function of the six co-ordinating conjunction. The same points of the six are: the position are same; the original meaning of co-ordinating conjunction influences discourse marker-function. The different points of the six are: they are used in different context styles; the frequencies are different; the discourse marker-functions are different. All in all, we concluded the previous studies and did more research of co-ordinating conjunction in the aspect of discourse markers.