A Corpus

Discourse Markers are dependent elements which contribute to signal therelation of an utterance to its immediate context. Some junctions, adverbs,prepositional phrases and syntax constituents are included in discourse markers.Some typical examples of them in English are:"well","you know",’"I mean", and"anyway".Discourse Markers correlate closely to speech situation while they have nothingto do with the situation a speech is talking about. Discourse markers have emotionaland expressive functions. They tend not to have a specific semantic meaning so theyneither affect the truth conditions nor add new conceptual content to an utterance. Theusing of discourse markers is a common linguistic phenomenon. By the view ofpragmatics, discourse markers are important because they help to form cohesive tiesand tact within the dialogue. They indicate a change in the direction of the discourse,or signal the speaker’s stance towards the utterer′real intention. Now discoursemarkers is increasingly receiving famous linguists′attention and is becoming a moreand more important researching topic, So this issue is of value both in theory andpractice.This paper is theoretically framed by "the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation",which was put forward by Jef. Verschueren, the founder and Secretary General of theInternational Pragmatics Association (IPrA). It maintains that language use is a processin which language users make continual linguistic choices in light of communicativecontext and communicative partner. Language users could make variable choicesbecause of the three features of language, namely, variability (the property oflanguage which defines the range of possibilities from which choices can be made),negotiability (the property of language responsible for the fact that choices are notmade mechanically or according to strict form-function relationships, but rather on thebasis of highly flexible principles and strategies) and adaptability (the property oflanguage which enables human beings to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range of options in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction forcommunicative needs).Adaptation theory includes adaptation of internal languagecontext (adaptation to discourse coherence)and adaptation of social context(adaptation to social norms and cultural psychology).These two aspects togetherconstitutes the verbal and nonverbal factors of language.This paper did a study based on the contribution of previous scholars. Firstly,according to Chen Caifen and Li Weiqing (China University Teaching,2010:59-61),this study generally divides the discourse markers into two groups: logical discoursemarkers and padding discourse markers. They could be further divided into15kinds.Then choose about70typical discourse markers and input them into Chinese LearnerEnglish Corpus as well as British National Corpus. By calculating their respectivefrequency, comparison is made to find how second language learners and nativelanguage users use them. At last,5discourse markers which are most frequently usedin China but not so frequently used by native speakers are chosen. In order to make anaccurate comparison, Concordance Software and the Proportion Calculator are needed.When the statistics are figured out, the thesis analyzes the results and some usages ofhigh-frequency discourse markers within the framework of Theory of LinguisticAdaptation.The study results shows that the5most frequently used discourse markers inChina with the biggest disparity in use to that of native speakers are and, so, now, Imean, you know. By comparing the use of and, so, now，I mean, you know in CLECand BNC, the author has the following findings:(1) Chinese EFL learners don’t knowhow to use and to join two or more topics together, to enter into a certain new topic,or express pragmatic meaning when connect different structures in discourses.(2)Chinese college students prefer to use so as causal markers rather than thus,therefore，hence, since．(3) The comparison shows the average frequency of now inBNC is much more than that in CLEC.(4) English native speakers use discoursemarker I Mean in a high frequency in BNC, which is almost18times of that inChinese English Learners（.5）English native speakers frequently use discourse marker you know while Chinese English Learners are less likely to use it.（6）Discoursemarkers could help language users adapt to linguistic context and extra-linguisticcontext better.