| The corpus-based comparison of discourse markers(DMs) in written language by native speakers and non-native speakers is developing as a new trend in the studies of DMs, to which the present study belongs. This comparative study attempts to investigate the similarities and differences in the frequency and use of DMs between English business news in China and America, mainly tries to answer the following two questions:(1) What are the respective features of the overall frequency of DMs in English business news in China and America? And what are the features of the frequency of DMs in each type across CBNC and ABNC?(2) What cognitive-pragmatic functions are shown and how do they show as to the selected DMs in the business news of China and America respectively? Are there any differences?The materials used for the present study include two self-built comparable corpora(ABNC and CBNC) of English business news taken from electronic versions of major American and Chinese magazines and newspapers including Newsweek, Washington Post and Beijing Reviews, China Daily, representing respectively English business news in America and China. By primarily adopting Chen Xinren's classification(2002) of DMs and using the classifications of Blakemore(1992) and Fraser(1999) for reference, this comparative study is conducted on DMs between English business news in China and America from cognitive-pragmatic perspective on the basis of two comparable corpora.Through the discussion of the frequencies of DMs across two corpora, conclusions are drawn as follows:(1) On the whole, there is no significant difference on the overall frequency of DMs, and at the same time, the frequency counts of the DM types in both corpora show an identical hierarchy with the DMs1(DMs strengthening an existing assumption) as the most frequently used and DMs2(DMs contradicting an existing assumption) and DMs3(DMs introducing contextual implications) ranking the second and third respectively. In addition, both Chinese and American English business news writers show preference to additive, adversative and inferential DMs.(2) There are significant differences on the frequencies of DMs in each type between CBNC and ABNC with DMs1 and DMs3 being overused in CBNC while DMs2 being overused in ABNC.(3) The majority of individual DMs among the three types indicate significant differences across the two comparable corpora.To shed further light on the role that DMs play in utterance interpretation, three representative DMs in addition, however, therefore are selected based on the data analysis above to do cognitive-pragmatic analysis within the framework of relevance theory. And by discussing the three DMs concretely, it is found that their pragmatic functions and utterance position also show differences across the two corpora and there are misuses as to therefore.Based on the above analysis, the present study puts forwards that as advanced learners, Chinese business news writers have obtained the “universal discourse competence” which can guide them to use the rules underlying the textual organization of English when writing a piece of text in English, and thus resulting no significant difference to American native speakers in the overall frequency of DMs. However, there is still a gap between Chinese news writers and American native-speakers in terms of the flexibility, accuracy and appropriateness of DMs. This comparative analysis is conducted in the hope of increasing people's understanding of DMs and arousing people's attention to the DMs, and thus improving their abilities of reading and writing business news in English. Moreover, it is hoped that the present study can provide some enlightenment for the teaching of English business news reading and writing as well as the training of business English professionals. |
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