A Study Of Discourse Markers In The English Debate: Chinese Speakers Vs Native English Speakers

Discourse Markers (DMs) are defined as a class of lexical expression drawn primarily from the syntactic classes of conjunction, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. (Fraser 1999). As one of the top ten word categories, they play a fundamental role in spoken interaction (Allwood 1996; Carter and McCarthy 2006). On average, an 'utterance particle' is found in every 1.5 seconds in continuous talk (Luke 1987).In recent years, the study of discourse markers has turned into rapid growth. DMs have been studied from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Different researches have different definitions and classifications of DMs.This paper firstly generalizes ten functions of DMs in the Chinese and English debates; it then presents detailed contrastive analysis of DMs, including macro and micro analysis, in terms of frequency, syntactic positions, and discourse functions. We make use of self-collected data, which consists of two parts:the "FLTRP Cup" National English Debating Competition and the Presidential Debates between Obama and McCain. It is found that five DMs were overused by native Chinese speakers, namely so, OK, however, you think and I/we know; two DMs were underused, i.e. I/we think and and. Of the other DMs analyzed, including well, you know, ok, yes and look, it is found that the location of well are different between native English speakers and native Chinese speakers. We also found that you know was underused, ok and yes were overused by native Chinese speakers. We regarded look as a discourse marker. And we also found that people like to use more than one DM one time and the preparing or not before the speaking is an important factor to influence the usage of the DMs.This study is, however, far from satisfactory due to the following practical reasons:the statistical analysis is purely manual rather than computer-aided; the corpus employed and the DMs located are both small in scale.The paper consists of six chapters. Chapter One mainly introduces the background, the significance and purpose, and outline of the paper. Chapter Two makes a general literature review of related discourse markers research overseas and domestic. Chapter Three describes the investigation, and offers the data collection. Chapter Four lists the different functions of DMs in the Chinese and English debates. Chapter Five presents the results and detailed discussions of the investigation, and shows some new findings, and makes some pedagogical implications. Chapter Six brings together the major findings. Limitations of the present paper are also discussed.