| Discourse Markers,defined as "lexical expressions that signal a relationship between the segments they introduce,S2,and the prior segments,S1" by Fraser(1996,1999),are commonly used in daily speech to manifest or emphasize the speaker's ideas,so as to facilitate listeners' comprehension.With the development of science and technology,however,discourse will not express meanings only through text mode,but through multi-modes,such as:images,music,space,gestures and so on.Therefore,discourse markers as kind of language modes will also contribute to completing the discourse construction together with other modes.Based on Kress and Van Leeuwen's(1996)Visual Grammar(VG),this thesis conducts a comparative study of discourse markers occurred respectively in English and Chinese TV talk shows from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA).The reason for such selection is that talk show as a kind of video discourse consists of language,images,music,text,sound and other modes,which makes the research on the coordination of different modes easier.The two talk shows used for the present study are Oprah Winfrey Show and Lu Yu You Yue.And the three similarities exist between them are:the two hostesses' education experience and ability of broadcasting,the approachable styles of the program and the stage settings,which are taken into considerations when deciding which talk show should be chosen as the sources of data.Six videos with each lasting 40 minutes in average are selected from each program.By transcribing the conversations and clipping the pictures,corpora are built in order to study discourse markers specifically from the perspective of word,gesture,and image.Chi-square Test has been made on the collected English and Chinese discourse markers,and the result indicates that significant differences exist between the two TV programs(P = 0.00).By observation,we find some other significant differences in the modes such as social distance and perspective between the two TV programs.In addition,the study shows that the multimodal interaction is conducive to the cohesion of not only texts,but also TV program discourses,so a good command of discourse markers will be beneficial to the representation of meanings.This comparative study not only enriches our theoretical understanding of discourse markers,but also is an attempt to promote the research on the cohesion of natural conversations with multimodes. |
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