A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Discourse Markers Used By Chinese College English Learners And Native English Speakers In Written English

Discourse marker is a common language phenomenon in everyday communication and writing.As one of the important cohesive devices that contribute to facilitating the comprehension of discourses,it can not only call the hearers' attention and show the attitude and emotion of the speakers,but also conduce to the discourse organization and the formation of coherent discourses.In consequence,since the 1970 s,discourse marker attracting an extensive attention of linguists becomes one of the hot research topics in the linguistic field.In addition,nowadays,no matter in daily writing practice of Chinese college English learners or in their examination compositions,the argumentative essay is the most common style.The argumentative essay,as a reasoning style,devotes to expressing the causal relationship between the thesis and the argument,which means the appropriate use of the discourse markers used for expressing the causality is essential to the output of a high-quality argumentative essay to a certain extent.Therefore,this thesis does research on the overall discourse markers,in the meanwhile,on the basis of the same classification framework,an intensive analysis of causal discourse markers is also made.At present,the empirical contrastive studies of discourse markers used by Chinese college English learners in written English have not yet formed a complete system.The present study,therefore,is of great significance both theoretically and practically.Based on Wang Lifei and Zhu Weihua's classification framework,this thesis adopts the contrastive interlanguage analysis to investigate the discrepancies in the usage of discourse markers,especially causal discourse markers used by Chinese college English learners and native English speakers in written English.The two corpora used are SWECCL 2.0 and LOCNESS.In the study,with the aid of free research instrument AntConc3.2.1,the seventy-five discourse markers in the classification framework are respectively retrieved in the two corpora and relevant index lines used for this research are extracted.Through the analysis of the obtained data,the findings are displayed as below:(1)Compared to native speakers,Chinese learners use the overall DMs in a high-density and low-variety way.(2)As for the use of the fifteen categories of discourse markers by Chinese learners and native speakers,there is a big similarity in the frequency ranking,while a great difference in the frequency of utilization of most categories.Moreover,the frequency of utilization of fillers with meaning in Chinese learners' corpus is much larger than that in native speakers' corpus,which shows that Chinese learners have an apparently colloquial tendency in their written English.(3)Chinese learners use more causal discourse markers than native speakers.(4)Chinese learners like to put causal discourse markers belonging to adverbial conjunct in the sentence-initial position,while the sentence-medial position is where native speakers prefer to use them.(5)There exist some obvious overuse and underuse of discourse markers,as well as some typical misuse of causal discourse markers in Chinese learners' English compositions.All the research results above indicate that there is a great gap between Chinese college English learners and native English speakers in the proficiency level of discourse markers.By analyzing the causes for these results,the present study provides some implications for English teaching in China: English teachers' overemphasis on discourse markers' function in strengthening the discourse cohesion and coherence is expected to be avoided;In the usual teaching,teachers should attach importance to the teaching of those unfamiliar discourse markers that students don't master well and especially focus on explaining the relevant grammar knowledge of causal discourse markers;There is a need for teachers to consciously strengthen students' stylistic awareness,lead students to avoid the negative transfer of mother tongue and the mistake of the overgeneralization,as well as cultivate students' sensitivity of the differences between Chinese and western cultures;In addition,English teachers ought to attempt to adopt the corpus-based teaching method,which is not only conducive to the teaching of discourse markers,but also of great benefit to students' output of more idiomatic interlanguage.The thesis ends up with some limitations of the present study and feasible orientations of researches on discourse markers in the future.