A Study On The Use Of Contrastive Discourse Marker But In Writing Of English Majors

Discourse markers(DMs), are common discourse segments that occur pervasively in utterances and texts. Although DMs do not exert any influence on propositional meaning or semantic meaning in an utterance, they can convey procedural meaning. In order to achieve the goal of communication, DMs have the potential to provide information and constrain the hearer’s assumptions, thereby, assisting the hearer in interpreting the implicature of an utterance.Research concerning DMs has developed along with the advent and development of pragmatic analysis and discourse analysis. Since the 1970 s, scholars have attached importance to the phenomenon of DMs. Scholars have tried to examine the functions of DMs on utterances and texts from diverse perspectives. Initially, studies on DMs concentrated on grammar and semantics; later on scholars converted to the perspective of cognitive-pragmatics. Research on DMs is currently dominated by oral form, especially of native speakers. There is still much room for improvement in the field concerning the writing forms of non-native learners. Studies that focus on the writing form of non-native speakers are worthy of further exploration and discussion.Based on the framework of the Relevance Theory, this paper explores the pragmatic functions and characteristics of the contrastive discourse marker(CDM) but by means of qualitative and quantitative study based on the corpus. This research aims to analyze the usages of the CDM but in writing, including the syntactic position, collocation and pragmatic functions through analysis of instances the CDM but extracted from the Chinese learner English corpus(CLEC) and the British national corpus(BNC). The concern of this paper is whether English majors use the CDM but inappropriately or not. If this phenomenon does exist, then what causes it? What aspects of writing should be improved in order to avoid this phenomenon as much as possible?This paper analyzes and compares the CDM but. The findings reveal that, in writing, the dominant pragmatic functions of but are:(1) objection,(2) the denial of assumption,(3)topic-shifting,(4) contrast,(5)complement and correction, and(6) strengthening. With respect to the usages, English majors do overuse the CDM but somewhat. This fact is attributable to negative transfer, language proficiency and pragmatic fossilization.This paper offers some tentative suggestions regarding the teaching of writing to alleviate the inappropriate use of the CDM but. During the process of teaching, the teachershould be aware of the inculcation of the pragmatic functions and characteristics of CDMs.Students can master the usages of CDMs by means of practice. Despite this fact, there are some limitations, this paper offers some tentative suggestions for the teaching of writing,which may contribute to the acquisition of the CDM but and improve the capability of Chinese English learners to use it in writing.