A Pragmatic Analysis Of Discourse Markers In College English Compositions

Discourse Markers, as a linguistic phenomenon, have attracted much attention from scholars of semantics, grammars and pragmatics, etc. With the help of different research methods and theories, they have achieved a lot in their own perspectives. Since the 1970s, the pragmatic functions of discourse markers have been a research focus. After reviewing the results of some scholars’research at home and abroad, this thesis finds that most of the scholars have focused on the oral form of discourse markers, and explore the features, positions and pragmatic functions of discourse markers in spoken language (oral test, interactive communication), while much fewer scholars focus on the written form of discourse markers. Based on the linguistic data (the English compositions written by students of non-English major sophomore), this thesis is to solve the following four research questions:1, what are the applied situations of the selected discourse markers by the quantitative analysis? 2, what are the similarities and differences of applied situations of these discourse markers in spoken and written language? 3, what ar.e the major textual functions of these 4 high frequency discourse markers in the linguistic data? 4, what are the defects in correctly using these 4 high frequency discourse marker? With the total number of misuses, this thesis also makes misuse analysis and correction.This thesis retrieves data with the software of Word and handles the data manually, which aims to analyze the distributions, types and frequencies of discourse markers. Also, this thesis aims to find out the preference of the two sexes and summarize the accuracy of their use. Then, this thesis displays the analysis results with different types of diagrams, and speculates students’use of discourse markers. The major findings are:the use of discourse markers is simple; these 5 high frequency discourse markers’ distributions are rather limited; there are rare differences in using these 5 high frequency discourse markers between male and female students; the students’ use of these discourse markers is affected by their oral habits, thinking fossilization and native language transference. Finally, with regard to the findings, this thesis provides some tentative teaching implications.Based on the framework of the Relevance Theory of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and the opinions of Fraser and Ran, we may conclude that discourse markers have significantly textual functions in written language, especially in compositions, as connecting discourses, maintaining semantic coherence, organizing texts and making meaning cohesion, etc. This thesis tries to explore the textual functions of these four high frequency discourse markers with illustrative examples. The main major findings are: "and" can function as additive meaning, progressive meaning and causal meaning; "so" can function as causal meaning and introducing a new topic; "but" and "however" can function as adversative meaning and introducing a new subject. And, this thesis has found all of misuses of these 4 high frequency discourse markers in the linguistic data in order to analyze these wrong cases and correct them. In this way, some defects of using these discourse markers will be found. Considering the misuses of discourse markers in students’ writing, it is still essential to introduce some basic knowledge and skills of using the discourse markers in English compositions.In a word, according to the pragmatic analysis of discourse markers in the college English compositions, this thesis aims to promote further study of the discourse markers in written English, especially the in-depth study of the linguistic data’ selected from the college English learners, and to make an improvement in the English proficiency and communicative skills of Chinese English learners.