A Metapragmatic Insight Into The Discourse Marker "I Mean"

In the daily communication, discourse markers (hereafter DMs) are widely used by speakers to facilitate or constrain the understanding of utterance. As an important way to promote the communication, DMs have been regarded as one of the most significant characteristics in the speech.Since the 1980s, an extensive research on DMs has been conducted by many researchers from different schools. Previous studies on DMs can mainly be summarized from three perspectives:the syntactic-pragmatic perspective, the semantic-pragmatic perspective and the cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Compared with the research on DMs abroad, the study at home are fewer. In addition, the study always focuses on the general use of discourse markers, whereas, the individual discourse marker (hereafter DM) has been given a miss. Therefore, the present research, based on the Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL), examines the DMI mean used by Chinese English majors in the TEM 4 oral test. It is hoped that the present research could give a detailed description of I mean employed by Chinese English majors and reveal their problems in utilizing it. To be specific, the present research attempts to address three questions:(1) What are the features in the use of I mean by Chinese English majors in terms of overall frequencies, turn positions and collocations?(2) How do Chinese English majors use the metapragmatic functions of I mean?(3) What are the factors that affect the inappropriate use of I mean by Chinese English majors?Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data, several major findings are observed. First, in terms of overall frequencies of DM Imean, it is found that most of the linguistic forms of I mean are taken as discourse marker and Imean is noticeably underused by learners compared with the use of the other three DMs; in terms of turn position, it is discovered that learners have a tendency to use Imean in the turn-medial position; in terms of collocation, it can be found that I mean is employed most frequently together with eh. Second, there are in total five types of metapragmatic functions of I mean discussed in the present study, i.e., self-repair, explanation and supplement, emphasis and reminding, as a face-threatening mitigator and as a filler. Furthermore, as for the overall distribution of the metapragmatic functions, it is found that the learners tend to overuse the function of explanation and supplement; while the function of self-repair is noticeably underused by Chinese English majors. Third, three factors may account for the inappropriate use of I mean by Chinese English majors, i.e., pragmatic transfer, pragmatic fossilization and situational anxiety.The major findings of the present research could shed some light on the second language learning as well as the future study on discourse markers. To be specific, first of all, teachers are suggested to raise the students’awareness of using DMs; secondly, teachers should provide more authentic materials and expand the students" pragmatic knowledge in the classroom teaching; finally, studying I mean in the metapragmatic paradigm could provide a new perspective for the future research on DMs.