A Study Of Discourse Markers Used By College Students In English Impromptu Speeches

In recent years, discourse markers have received great attention. Scholarsgenerally believe that the discourse marker is a common language phenomenon whichhas procedural meaning but does not affect the propositional meaning of an utterance,such as conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs and fixed phrases collocations. Based ondifferent research perspectives, scholars have provided their own interpretation ofdiscourse markers in terms of definition, classification and characteristics, and theyagree that discourse markers are the structures that cannot affect the truth condition ofutterances, playing an irreplaceable role in the semantic coherence and discourseproduction and interpretation.Coherent theory explains that discourse markers are the necessary condition toform a coherent utterance. The coherence includes three sub-categories: localcoherence, global coherence, and contextual coherence. Local and global coherenceare two ways to demonstrate the semantic coherence function of discourse markers byindicating the relations between discourse adjacent units and between utterances.Contextual coherence illustrates the pragmatic coherence function of discoursemarkers, in which speakers adopt discourse markers to express their own attitudes,emotions and views, while hearers judge the context and interpret what the speakerswant to express.The present study, based on the coherence theoretical framework, examinedOne-Hundred English Speeches with Comments: English Public Speaking Contest2002-2005and2006-2011, which involved200public speeches from10years’collection. In order to explore high level English learners’ use of discourse markers interms of frequency, distribution, category, quality and the effect, this study set up acorpus of88excellent impromptu speeches, which were analyzed both quantitativelyand qualitatively by using Readability Analyzer1.0, SPSS11.5, and AntConc3.2.1.The present study aimed to analyze the coherence function and the effect ofdiscourse markers used by Chinese college students in the impromptu speeches,expecting to offer certain reference value for the impromptu speeches in daily communication and competition, and English speeches education. The conclusionsfrom this study are as follows:1) The college students have a good command ofdiscourse markers, which makes the English proficiency go into full play;2) For thesame type of discourse markers, some are possibly overused and others ignored;3)The discourse markers’ function of coherence is restricted by the specific discoursecontext.